Is Your Tongue Strangling Your Voice & Sabotaging Your Singing?
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00:00 Welcome to the Voice Vibe Podcast with Special Guest Matt Edwards
00:15 Matt Edwards: A Musical Theater Voice Expert
00:48 The Power of Collaboration and Shared Passion
01:24 Unlocking the Secrets of the Tongue in Singing
02:25 Matt Edwards' Journey: From Childhood Singer to Voice Pedagogy Expert
06:56 The Transformation from Classical to Commercial Styles
14:37 The Role of the Tongue in Vocal Performance
20:20 Demystifying Tongue Tension and Vocal Tract Coordination
23:11 Exploring the Mysteries of Vocal Resonance
24:08 The Magic Behind Vocal Timbre: Back Room vs. Front Room
24:59 Mastering Vocal Quality: The Role of the Larynx
25:32 Vowel Clarity and Vocal Styles: A Singer's Guide
26:25 The Art of Vocal Coordination: Stability vs. Agility
27:22 Unlocking the Power of the Tongue in Singing
29:00 Practical Exercises for Vocal Freedom
34:27 Advanced Techniques for Tongue Coordination
41:31 Concluding Thoughts and Next Steps
Welcome to the Voice Vibe Podcast with Special Guest Matt Edwards
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Philippe Hall: Hello and welcome to the Voice Vibe Podcast. My name is Philippe Hall. I'm your host. Today I have a friend and colleague as my guest speaker and somebody I appreciate and admire very much. His name is Matt Edwards.
Matt Edwards: A Musical Theater Voice Expert
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Philippe Hall: Matt Edwards, I can read through his bio for you. You should know he's a professor and coordinator of the musical theater voice at Shenandoah Conservatory.
He's also the artistic director of the Contemporary Commercial Music Vocal Pedagogy Institute. He's taught a lot of famous singers and also he's an author and has published many, many articles. He has a new book coming out soon. So keep your eyes out for that one. I also like to just tell you about my personal experience with Matt.
Um, we started doing some collaborations a couple of years ago. And every time we talk, it's like, uh, our brains are absolutely connected. It's just refreshing. It's fun. We really. share a lot in common about our passion for singing, about our passion for teaching, and are always considering how can we help singers get the results they want faster.
So I'm, I'm a big fan of everything Matt does and it's just always a pleasure to have him.
The Importance of Tongue Articulation in Singing
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Philippe Hall: And today we're going to be talking about the tongue and how to release tension through improving articulation. This is a big, big deal. You know the tongue is responsible for all the vowel sounds and resonance, so many things.
And yet, an unskilled tongue might get in your way. Let me, welcome with me Matt Edwards. Hi Matt, how are you doing today? Good, how are you? Great, happy that we're doing this again.
Matt Edwards: Me too.
Philippe Hall: This is a [00:03:00] great topic, you know, that you suggested. I'm really happy you suggested this. Um, tongue, tongue articulation, the movement, it's, it's just so vital to good singing.
And it seems like in the beginning, people just, even, even if you want to really be aware of it, just take some time to develop that internal awareness of what's going on with my tongue.
Matt Edwards: Yeah, absolutely.
Matt Edwards' Journey into Singing and Teaching
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Philippe Hall: Well, tell us a little bit about how you even got interested in singing. I mean, you've been doing this for a long time.
You've worked with lots of universities so that you've spoken at all kinds of voice conferences, but did you imagine when you were a young man that you would be doing this today? Was this always your dream or how did it come about?
Matt Edwards: Yeah, so, uh, I don't, my parents say I was always singing when I was a kid.
They have a photo of me when I was like six years old with one of those little radio things with a microphone, the old Fisher-Price toy out in the front of the house singing on it. So I know I was always, you know, singing as a kid. Uh, you know, my dad was a factory worker. I didn't grow up surrounded by the arts until I got into high school.
Uh, and I mean, my family was into music, but it was more like country music and, uh, rock music. You know, Bruce Springsteen, the Statler Brothers, credence, Clearwater Revival, led Zeppelin, guns and Roses. Listening to all that music while I grew up, I wasn't exposed to like fine arts really until high school.
And then in high school we had this program called Muse Machine. In, uh, Dayton, Ohio, where they would bring in, uh, performing artists from the symphony, the ballet, the opera, the theater, and bring 'em into campus. And then we got like cheap tickets for $10. You could go see, you know, one of these productions at one of the, uh, venues, and it was a great way to be exposed to stuff you'd never been exposed to before.
And so when I was in high school, I was singing in choir, I was playing guitar, I had a band that I was playing with, and then I started doing musicals as well, and doing the plays, and I kind of loved anything that I could do with my voice, and I didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do, I just knew I wanted to do something performing related.
And so when it came time to go to college again, like, you know, my family didn't really know where to go in the fine and performing arts. And you know, this is back in just the earliest days of the Internet. It wasn't at all like it is today, where there's college coaches helping you figure everything out.
So I kind of had to figure it out on my own. And it looked like I was going to go be a music theater, music education major at Bowling Green State University. But this was back in the nineties when there was a lot of economic turmoil and my dad got laid off from his job right when the deposits were due.
So that kind of went out the window, didn't have a choice anymore. And my only real option was to go to my hometown university, Wright State University, which had a really great music education program, but it was classically oriented. So I started [00:06:00] off at Wright State as a music education major studying classical voice.
It was about the second week of school where the head of the voice program asked me to audition for the opera. And I was like, okay, like that sounds fun. And so I auditioned for the opera and I got in to it. It was magic flute and they had me sing the speaker role. And then I was the second man in armor and the second priest.
And, uh, so I got to do a bunch of little bit rolls and I had a really great time. And then the next thing, you know, I got cast in the Dayton opera chorus to do cozy with them. And then I started singing with some of the symphonies in town and the chorus. And then I got a couple of little solo spots as well.
And I started thinking, this is what I want to do. And I had a coach at the time who was a really great lifelong mentor of mine named Mark Jones. And Mark said, well if you really want to do this opera thing, you need to go to a school that's known for doing opera. And so he helped me transfer to the Cleveland Institute of Music.
And I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew it was the school in Cleveland. And again, pre internet days. You can't just look things up. And if you don't know, the Cleveland Institute of Music is probably one of the top five conservatories in the United States. It's listed as one of the top 20 in the entire world.
I had no idea what I got myself into. And, uh, but I got there and, uh, there is only they had a cap on the number of students that were allowed in the program is 36. If there's more than 36 people, no one got in that year. Two of us got for the undergrad program. And so once I got there, though, it was all classical all the time.
There was no musical theater there. No, it was no rock and roll. And so I really went all in on the opera side of things. But as I started doing that, I still had this love for musical theater and rock music and other kinds of singing styles. And so I kind of pushed that down inside of me because I was going to be an opera singer.
And that's what you did. You focused all on opera. So then I performed some outreach programs with Lyric Opera Cleveland, Cincinnati Opera. And then went to do my master's at Louisiana State University, which was a little bit more welcoming of commercial styles. They, we had a music theater class we could take.
I got into a voice pedagogy class with my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife. And um, we both were sitting in this class learning about how the voice works. And we had the opportunity to do our own research. And when I was doing research, I started finding people like Robert Edwin, Lisa Popiel, uh, and uh, you know, Joe Estill, all these other teachers who had already been pioneering these commercial styles and pedagogies for them.
And I, it is kind of intrigued me and I started thinking, Hmm, I wonder if there's more to this. And so I started trying to apply my classical technique to singing songs that I had written. And it wasn't good. I mean, it was rough enough that even my. My fiance at that time was like, yeah, I mean, you know, I played the recording and that's when we kind of realized we have a [00:09:00] problem here.
You know, here I have graduated from one of the top conservatories in the world and I'm at one of the best master's programs in the country. And yet I can't sing commercial styles anymore. And my musical theater is not the way that musical theater is supposed to be. And so that started me on my journey of voice science and trying to understand what is different.
Uh, you know, between these different styles and, uh, I got lots of pushback all along the way. I remember I was a teaching assistant and the person who supervised me, the professor who supervised me, told me he was worried about me at one point after he watched me teach because I didn't do things like anybody else.
And I was insisting on coming up with my own approach. And he was really concerned that I'd never find a full-time faculty position, or I wouldn't, uh, you know, be able to be a successful teacher. It worked out. Spoiler alert, it all worked out for the best . And um, so I just took that. I was like, okay. And I just kept going down the path that I wanted to go [00:10:00] down.
And along the way I met lots of different mentors, lots of people that helped me out, and I started kind of piecing things together. And that's what I've been doing now really for the last 20 years is starting to craft new techniques for singers to help them sing any style that they want. And it's to the point now that I don't even sing classically anymore, except for my own, you know, work to keep my voice in shape.
And I don't teach anybody classically anymore. I work with classical singers all the time, helping them transition over. But now I'm all in on the commercial styles and musical theater. And, uh, you know, I didn't know that I was going to teach. My mom was a teacher before I was born. She went back to teaching after, you know, I went to college.
And, um, so it was in my family, the, the teaching thing. And so I was always surrounded by education. It was in the back of my mind. But what happened is, is I started helping other people just to pay the bills while I was performing. I slowly started realizing that I liked teaching more than I [00:11:00] liked performing.
And I know right where the big revelation happened was backstage at Ashlawn Opera Festival. I was doing My Fair Lady. And I was backstage reading acting books and voice pedagogy books and uh, people were afraid I was gonna miss my interest in my entrances because I was more interested in what I was reading and texting my students than I was in being in the show.
And that was the big realization where I was like, huh, I guess I'm supposed to teach 'cause that's more fun at this point. And so when I returned back, we were living in upstate New York at the time. I was singing with an opera company, teaching adjunct to two universities, working in a recording studio, running a black box theater company.
And, uh, that's when I decided, I think I'm going all in on teaching. And so I did the Nats intern program the next year. If you don't know that it's the national association of teachers of singing. They have a program where they take 12 young voice teachers from around the country and they put them with four master teachers.
And then you get mentored for nine days and you [00:12:00] learn how to become a better teacher. And so I did that as a, uh, an intern. and it opened my eyes to a whole new world of things. And the next year I saw there was a job at Shenandoah university that was looking for an opera singer with experience teaching rock and roll and musical theater.
And I was like, wow, that's me. And, uh, I applied and I got the job. And so I've been here ever since the fall of 2010. I ended up going back to teach as a master teacher for the Nats intern program. Uh, they, according to them, I'm the quickest turnaround ever between somebody being an intern to being a master teacher.
So I'm really proud of that. Uh, but I. credit all that to them to Nats for giving me so much support all along the way as I was doing my work. They asked me to write the, my book, they supported me as you mentioned of going and talking at all kinds of Nats chapters and Nats members have had me to their universities and I've gotten to do well over a hundred workshops at these different organizations [00:13:00] because of Nats.
And so I'm really thankful to that organization. And uh, when I came here at Shenandoah, the musical theater program was good. It had a really great regional reputation and now we're on the list of being in the top. 10. Some people say top five. I saw somebody last night who's a casting director that told me, no, you're one of the top schools period.
And I'm actually broadcasting to you from New York City right now because I got to go see one of my students, star in the Outsiders on Broadway last night. So that was a, uh. It was a pretty incredible, uh, moment to get to watch, you know, how much this program has changed since I've been here. And uh, yeah, it was an exciting moment, but, uh, so that's kind of my story and my background.
It's been a fun journey. Uh, I always tell though, anybody who's watching who struggles, it had lots of struggles along the way, so nothing ever really came easy to me. I had to work hard for everything. Everything with my voice was a struggle and so I'm think that's part of what makes me a good teacher is that when [00:14:00] somebody comes to me and they're frustrated and they're talking about all of their challenges, I get it.
I've been there. You know, at one point when I was in high school, they thought I was tone deaf. Because I just had such an uncoordinated voice. I couldn't sing on pitch at all. I was like in the wrong octave and then I finally figured it out. So I get it. And I, that's why I think I really enjoy helping others is because I want to make their journey easier than it was for me.
Philippe Hall: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. Um, and, and congratulations, you know, it's, it's quite the journey. And again, I'm just share your passion. That is. I find the same motivation in teaching and it's really good to hear, um, that you're sympathetic to people's struggles and journey. And I know I have had to work hard.
I know why I wanted to do so many different things, you know, be it. I was a musical singer, quite successful over in Europe for a good decade. Then I suddenly decided I wanted to be [00:15:00] an opera tenor and went back and got a master's, went through all that. People thought I was crazy. But, uh, and I've sung rock and roll venues for hundreds to 30, 40, 000 and pop concerts and acapella and Manhattan transfer, all kinds of stuff.
I just loved it. I just loved it and I wanted to do it, but that took a lot of cross training and definitely, I mean, every. Every year there were frustrations, difficult things to overcome. So I guess we both are sending out a message that if this is your passion, don't give up. It's going to be hard from time to time.
Just keep going. So one of the things that I learned about singing in different styles is the tongue and I didn't know what I didn't know until it was in the way and then I'm like, Oh my gosh, my tongue is. It's totally in the way, [00:16:00] it's like slow, it's awkward, it's not stretching, it hurts to stretch it, what's going on?
And um, still today, working with a lot of singers just on that tongue, that massive muscle inside of our vocal tract. Tell us uh, what, what you, why don't you just share with us what, what you would like to share with us today about the tongue, how you help singers. improve what they're doing by working with their tongue.
Matt Edwards: Yeah.
Exploring the Vocal Tract: Insights from the Cadaver Lab
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Matt Edwards: So I think that, you know, there's lots of reasons that the tongue is difficult for us. Uh, the tongue takes up over half of the vocal tract. And so one of the things that we have at Shenandoah that is a real gift to voice teachers is we have a cadaver lab. And so if you don't know what this is, this is where people donate after they are deceased before they make the decision before they pass away.
Sorry. They make the decision to donate their body to science. their body is donated to made available to educati you can then go in and do understand the human body meant for medical practic physicians, assistants, p Shenandoah is probably, I think it's one of the only universities in the United States where the voice pedagogy faculty have access.
I have a key card, like I can just go into the cadaver lab when no one's in there and do, uh, you know, research on where, I don't mess with things that are already under place, but they have a time of the year that we can go in there and we can do our own dissections. And so we've been able to really go inside of the vocal tract and explore it and get a great understanding of what is actually in there instead of just these theoretical, uh, concepts and images on paper to actually touch a tongue, to actually touch the vocal tract and know how big it is, how much space that tongue takes up.
And it is [00:18:00] massive. It's wide, it's thick. and it's long and it clogs up your vocal tract and everyone's mouth shape is different. I have a rather skinny, narrow jaw line. You know, I had a teacher with a jaw line, probably about twice as big as mine and he would tell me things to do with my tongue and I would do them and they did it work.
And now I understand in hindsight, it's because my jaw shape Is narrower than my tongue. So when I tried to do the things that that teacher was able to do with his tongue, with a wi wide jaw, it just wasn't the same. And so I have to do things differently. Yes. So I think that's one of the things you notice when you work with enough of the, uh, singers and the cadavers that you see all of these different body shapes and how that.
affects how the tongue is positioned inside of that vocal tract. Some people have longer tongues. Some people have shorter tongues. Uh, some people are tongue tied. I have a student I'm working with [00:19:00] this year who is tongue tied. We went ahead and got this corrective surgery for that. And it was a game changer for her.
Her voice is so free. Now she's able to do all kinds of things she couldn't do before, both in her more like golden age mix and her contemporary mix and contemporary belt. And so, you know, we have issues like that to get in the way. We have people that have TMJ disorders, and TMJ disorders affect the jaw, but when it affects the jaw, it also affects the movement of the tongue.
And so that gets in the way. We have a lot of teachers, especially in choirs, that talk about backspace, like feeling a light bulb in the back of your throat, or a pear in the back of your throat, golf ball, whatever you want to think about. And what ends up happening a lot of times when a singer tries to go for that imagery is they actually depress their tongue in the back.
And what a lot of people don't realize is the tongue is attached to something called the epiglottis. So the, uh, the, uh, larynx sits here, the epiglottis is here. And when the tongue pulls back, it actually [00:20:00] pushes that epiglottis over the opening of the vocal folds and it muffles the sound. And I have some images I'll show you here in a few minutes.
Philippe Hall: Cool.
Matt Edwards: And so when we try to get those, some of those ideas of, you know, backspace, we actually end up depressing the tongue and blocking the vocal tract. And if we really want space, what we need to do is to get the tongue to move up and forward. That actually opens up the space behind the back wall and the tongue itself.
Uh, one of the misconceptions is, is that you can actually make backspace and I run into teachers who believe this all the time. They're telling people to open the back to feel things in the back, but if you take them to a cadaver lab and you show them a vocal tract, they can stick their finger in the back wall and they will discover that it's all bones.
Because directly behind the back wall of the pharynx are the cervical vertebrae. And there is nothing that can move backwards back there. It's locked in tight. You can lift the soft palate and get it out of the way, but most of the time when you [00:21:00] think you're creating back space, you're actually depressing that tongue.
So knowing that and having these revelations of how much people are doing that when they depress the tongue, it tightens up what are called the submandibular muscles and muscles underneath of your jaw, those attached to the larynx, to the hyoid bone. So then your larynx mobility is limited because of the tongue tension.
And so as I discovered all these things, I realized we really need to give singers better tools to work with what we are currently calling tongue tension and have for years and years and years. Yes.
Redefining Tongue Tension: A Lack of Coordination
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Matt Edwards: And what I've come to believe is that it's not actually tension. It's a lack of coordination of the tongue.
So if you think about it, what ends up happening is somebody tries to sing an E vowel, for instance. And when they go to sing an E vowel, their tongue goes backwards and up, and they get, Mmmmmmm. And when they get that sound, they feel like they have tension [00:22:00] and they don't have tension. They just have a tongue that isn't coordinated to go in the direction where we know the E vowel is formed.
That direction is in the front half of the mouth. Very similar to where you would pronounce K like a K. And so if you say key. Like the thing you use to open a door key, you're going to get your tongue in a better position for E and if we can retrain the tongue to go up into that frontal position, we lose the tension, right?
Because what's now happening is the vocal track is aligned and coordinated in a way that's actually productive for the vocal quality you're trying to produce. And so your body is no longer fighting you. When you form the eval by drawing the tongue back and up, your ear knows that's not an eval. So you start trying to constrict muscles in your, uh, instrument to try to squeeze that vocal quality into a bright E.
But all you're doing is squeezing, which [00:23:00] means all you're doing is creating tension. Ah, this is so great. Yeah, the tension is a result of a lack of coordination.
Philippe Hall: Yes,
Matt Edwards: not because you actually have tension.
Philippe Hall: Ah, yes. Yeah, I just get so excited when we're talking because i'm like yes, this is exactly what's going on in my mind And I I observe the same things and you're so right on and it's it's really interesting So maybe we just for a brief second talk about why people talk about this backspace Yeah, if if your tongue's depressing and it's on that epiglottis or blocking the main Resonator your pharyngeal tube You're not going to get that vowel clarity, the resonance.
It's just not going to work as well. You get the tongue out of the way, suddenly things are working well. And now you have this sensation of backspace. It's so why, why do people feel the backspace?
Matt Edwards: So there's some people who think that what we might be feeling is contraction of the stylo [00:24:00] gloss muscle. So the stylo gloss muscle comes back up here to the styloid process and it detaches in the side to the, the gloss, the tongue.
And when you pull that tongue back, you feel that muscle contracting. Mm-Hmm. .
Exploring the Mysteries of Vocal Technique
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Matt Edwards: And so we feel something happening right here. Oh, and so there's a hypothesis out there that what we're actually doing is engaging that muscle and our kinesthetic awareness is misinterpreting that as backspace when it's actually backward tongue movement.
And I think that's in general is we have a lot of nerve endings in the tongue. And so when we get that all in the back. We feel like we're making space because we're contracting muscles in the tongue. So we feel something there.
Philippe Hall: Yeah. Doesn't that produce that it produces that kind of pseudo, uh, pseudo operatic sound that an, a legit opera singer won't consider a healthy opera sound, but you get the internal feeling like you're doing it.
Matt Edwards: You do. It's that warm, that Oh, which might sound really nice and warm to you. In your head.
The Magic Behind Vocal Timbre: Back Room vs. Front Room
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Matt Edwards: But to an audience number 50 foot away from you in an acoustic hall a hall made for acoustic singing styles It just sounds muffled and sometimes can early like yeah Sound that works its way in there Where the real magic happens when what you mentioned is we open up everything behind the hump of the tongue So Ken Bozeman is a voice teacher who's done a lot of research into vocal acoustics You And what he says is that we can really kind of divide the vocal tract into two parts, the back room and the front room.
The back room is everything behind the hump of the tongue. The front room is everything in front of the hump of the tongue. Changes to the space behind the hump of the tongue are primarily responsible for changes in timbre. Right. If our voice is bright or warm and we can [00:26:00] play around with that, you can feel it.
If you put your fingers here on your larynx and you go, wow, wow, wow. You'll feel that your larynx goes up.
Philippe Hall: Wow.
Matt Edwards: Yeah.
Mastering Vocal Quality Through Larynx Manipulation
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Matt Edwards: So when your larynx goes up, you're narrowing the space in the back room. You get a brighter quality. If we sip spaghetti, if we hold our fingers on the side of our larynx and imagine that you're sipping a string of spaghetti and you go, then go, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, you're going to feel that your larynx has dropped.
The back room has opened up a little bit and all of a sudden as I talk this way I have a warmer timbre. So those shifts are happening there.
Achieving Clarity in Vowels for a Classical Sound
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Matt Edwards: Then what Bozeman says is that then the clarity of the vowels is what's happening in front of the hump of the tongue. So if I want a warmer, uh, uh, E vowel, I could do E With round lips, still keeping my tongue fronted.
Or if I want a brighter E, then I would spread my lips. Eeeeee. I'm going from Eeeeee. E is playing with the clarity of that vowel. So then, really what you do is you come up with whatever combination that you want of having, you know, more ho ho ho or an uh space in the back room, and then the E on the front room, and then you can get a clearer classical sound.
E, E, E, E, E. One that has more of a, uh, an actually bringing, uh, resonance to it.
Adapting Vocal Techniques for Different Singing Styles
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Matt Edwards: So when, you know, different styles require different, uh, recipes, so to say. And so there are singers, if they're looking for, uh, you know, a vocal quality to sing Mozart, they're going to want to have some stability. in the back room so that their resonance remains the same as the front room articulates the different vowels and consonants.
But if you're working with a singer songwriter, most of the time stability is not on their uh, goal, list of goals. They don't want a stable vocal track to have a stable tone all the time. They want to have a tone quality that responds to their intent. as the storyteller in that moment. And [00:28:00] so for those singers, we're more working on coordination so that the backroom and front room remain agile and adjust automatically to the intent of the performer.
So that's where, when we start thinking about different styles, we have to address this backroom front room metaphor in different ways. And that's where then we have to train the tongue in different ways.
Philippe Hall: Yeah, I love that. I love that.
The Role of the Tongue in Vocal Articulation
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Philippe Hall: Some, you know, just some thoughts for the listeners. So I, I, I tell all of my clients, your tongue is the front wall of the pharynx.
It's movable part of the tube. You've got the three sides that they can move a little bit. They can contract, uh, constrict, contract and shape a little bit, but that tongue, that's the whole movable front wall. It's ma has a massive, Input, uh, impact on your singing. And I try and tell them the pharynx, that backspace you're talking about, it's like the cake and it's the same cake for almost everything you do.
But the icing is the [00:29:00] style, like that front space, just the finishing touch. So I'm, I'm right on board with that. What's, a lot of people will feel the tension underneath, underneath the jaw, underneath there. And you said these are, there's muscles that are on kind of below the tongue that connect into the hyoid bone, that the tongue's right up there.
And some people feel tightness further back by more in the root of the tongue. So I'm right on board with you that, uh, I think the tongue can go in so many directions at the same time. It's quite miraculous that a lack of coordination can make it slow and a little bit clumsy. And maybe there's some gripping inside of the tongue.
So how are we going to go? What can we do to improve? The tongue movement to perceptively release tension and get a better sound.
Matt Edwards: Yeah.
Practical Exercises for Enhancing Tongue Coordination
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Matt Edwards: So one of the first things I do, uh, is start with these muscles, these submandibular muscles. And so you just get your fingers underneath of your tongue and swallow. And when you swallow, you're going to pay attention to what you feel down there.
Most people are going to feel it contracting. When we swallow, what happens is we close our vocal folds. Air pressure builds up beneath the vocal folds. That air pressure starts to lift the larynx. And as the larynx lifts, our tongue retracts, and then the tongue goes back to help guide the bolus, which is what we call the food or the any liquid that we have.
And it moves it back into the, uh, pharynx and down into the esophagus. So there's a real connection here between the tongue and swallowing. So I first get, uh, anybody I'm working with to feel that connection of how the tongue functions in swallowing. Then we start trying to just make a vocal utterance.
without any engagement of that muscle. And this sounds easy, but in all reality, it's very difficult for a lot of singers. So you get your thumb under here. I like to try eh and ah as my two starting places. I find those two vowels work well for most singers. And so we just start with a simple, Uh, Uh, or Ah, Ah, right?
And so you are going to begin with just speech until you get this muscle free, where you feel that you're phonating, so your vocal folds vibrating. sound is coming out, but engaging and we're just f this will work. Then once you have freedom and that this may take you two wee with, right? And motor sk would say you're in the c means that you don't even a thing for you.
And when stage, it takes a while t to do the new skill. And need a lot of outside gui So that's where the most frustration usually sets in when you're working on something in any skill acquisition. And so it can be frustrating. So do it in five minutes here, five minutes there, just do it throughout your day.
Eventually you want to get to the spot where you can sustain a pitch, uh, where this muscle stays completely free. We're not worried about tone quality. Right. Mm-Hmm? . Yes. So, yeah, what you just did is great, right? You just,
Philippe Hall: yeah. Uh uh. That's. Uh,
Matt Edwards: yeah, it's
Philippe Hall: very interesting.
Matt Edwards: Yeah. And so I remind everybody I'm working with that sounding good in this phase is not the goal.
We sound good when we're communicating something with our voice and our voice responds accordingly when you've got your thumbs tucked under your tongue. Go ahead. That's communicating nothing. That's a functional exercise.
Philippe Hall: Yeah. And I love you said you just told people, uh, it. This can take a couple weeks because a lot of people get very frustrated because It's it's these little steps.
So i've adopted the same i'd say now It's simple, but it's not easy. So I find a lot of my exercises the training just like this It's it's simple. You just hold on to your chin put your thumbs under there and make sure nothing tightens up pretty simple Now doing it Is not easy So it's gonna take some time Because uh, that's where singers freak out.
They're like you make that look so easy I'm, like it it is simple, but it's not easy to do it extremely. Well, you know, you have to take time and say Just practice just like you said here five minutes there five minutes throughout your day and give yourself a couple weeks and then All of a sudden BAM, you're gonna have this Acceleration in your singing which which is fun, right?
Matt Edwards: Yeah, it is. I love that. Those simple not easy. It's very true Very accurate So, you know, then we go through trying to get this muscle disengaged.
Advanced Vocal Exercises: From Simple Sounds to Complex Scales
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Matt Edwards: Once we can get it disengaged on a single pitch, then we start to do glides. So finding, uh, when glides are easy, we go to stepwise motion, uh, taking that whatever bright, warm, doesn't matter.
We just want the tongue out of the way.
Philippe Hall: That is so cool. It reminds me of like, of doing. Reminds me of some of my master teachers. They just open their mouth and they do these amazing, they'd switch between all kinds of vowels and nothing would perceivingly move except that tongue. And I would watch them and go, what are you doing?
And how do you do that? And now I see myself doing the same thing. Open your mouth, leave everything there. Let's isolate the vocal folds. And, uh, and it's just really quite amazing. I'm going to work with that personally. So everybody listening should really. [00:35:00] Try and work with this. So first of all, you said, just make a sound, any sound, get it free.
Then maybe shift to some different vowels and then start doing some glides. That's like phase one, phase two, phase three, and phase four. Now we're doing some, some scales and getting more complex through the range or putting it on the melody of a song. Are there, did I get those steps down?
Matt Edwards: Yeah, no, I agree.
So it's starting there, right? So then there's the next step, which is improving the movement of the tongue itself. So first we try to break away that motor connection, motor connection in your brain, where your body thinks it has to contract the tongue when phoning. So we need to break that apart and teach your body that.
No, that muscle stays free when we phon it. Once it's free, we then have to teach the tongue how to move. So the first step of this next part of the process is doing home alone face. So home alone face is where you put your hands on the side of your face like Kevin when he looks in the mirror. You know, and you put your hands there and you gently drop your jaw.
Uh huh. And then you're going to use the tip of your tongue, the blade of your Right behind your upper teeth to articulate LA. LA. So, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA. Very simple, but not easy. Ha ha ha. Love it. So, and what I notice, I teach this to people all the time and I watch as their tongue does not go up behind their upper teeth.
Philippe Hall: Ah, yes. Fascinating, isn't it?
Matt Edwards: Yeah, it flips up in the air, but it never touches behind the upper teeth and then you watch it move up into the left. Then it comes down and it moves up into the right. Then it moves up and back and it does everything except what you want it to do. And that's an important discovery to have because that's indicating that you have a lack of coordination in the blade of your tongue.
So all of those dental eyes And labial consonants that require your tongue, your lips, uh, and your teeth are going to be difficult for you if you cannot get that tongue to just flick out the consonant.
Philippe Hall: Let's just say like, those for the people that might not know, we were just talking about a D, a T, an L, uh, maybe anytime you say blah or blah combination of lips and tongue movement up in the front there.
Matt Edwards: Yep. And so what happens is if your tongue doesn't kind of go where it's supposed to for the consonant, then when it's supposed to go to the vowel, you're already stuck because the tongue was not moving really well on the way to the constant. So then when it shifts to the vowel, it's a problem. So we start with law, same process, single pitch.
Then we start trying to do like a one, two, three, two, one, then one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one. I always start with a single pitch, then expand it a little bit, then expand it a little bit more. After they've mastered how to get [00:38:00] the blade of the tongue, the tip of the tongue to move, we then work on getting the body of the tongue to move.
So to do that, we're going to use a G. And we're going to go back to the same Home Alone face, hands on the side of your face. And then tongue is going to come up to form a G on the hard palate. So that's where you've got a bony part of your mouth. That's the hard palate. Then if you run your tongue backwards, you feel where it gets soft.
That's a soft palate. We can do gah, gah on the soft palate, but for this exercise, we want it up front. It's going to make a brighter quality, gah, gah, gah. We want more of that for this exercise.
Philippe Hall: Ah, ah, ah. Really interesting, because you can, I can feel the difference of the stretch, you know, I'm a freaky singer that knows, feels his tongue.
Right? But the back, but the, it's a, definitely a different place, because if you go to that back dopey, uh, guh, guh, guh, you're, you're, you're depressing your tongue, aren't you? It's getting way back and getting in the way. And that's not going to be an articulation. Maybe we want is we've got to get that tongue's got to go to the vowel position after that's pretty far away.
So I liked, I liked that. You said, just think of getting it to touch the hard palate instead of. Like the uvula.
Matt Edwards: Yeah. And so then you're just going to do your gah, gah, gah, gah, gah, gah, gah, gah, and move that. When you've coordinated the la by itself and the gah by itself, you're now going to put the two together.
And we're gonna get ga la ga la ga la ga la ga, which is teaching your tongue how to move up and forward, up and forward, because this is the movement that actually exists in most singing.
Philippe Hall: So
Matt Edwards: again, we start on a singular pitch, move to that 1, then move to the 1, 2, 1. Getting the tongue to bounce around.
Philippe Hall: You know what? I'm just going to say this. It's a confession when people used to say 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. I had no idea. I pretended to know what they meant, but it's just basically you're at the keyboard. They're just the notes, like, whatever note you start on, that's your first note, and going up and down, one, two, three, two, one, one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, with your uh, your fingers on the keyboard.
Just in case there was anybody that was really smart out there and, like me, that was, didn't know what that meant, Now, now, you know,
Matt Edwards: yeah, this is a great point. It's just, it's a scale. It's a major scale. 1, 2, 1. And we keep that distance between pitches when we move up a pitch. And so it's just a structured way.
To exercise your voice. I think about a lot of voice training is having a lot in common with physical training. Mm-Hmm. . And so when you go to the gym, you work five pounds first, then you go [00:41:00] up to 10 pounds, then you go up to 15, then you go up to 20, then 25, et cetera. So when we're doing these pitch exercises and moving throughout the pitch range, it's just kinda like we're adding a little bit more challenge to it when we go up and pitch a little bit more of a challenge, you know?
Especially for somebody who's working on their upper range. Yeah. So we get the ga, we get the la going. Then we start doing more complex things. So one of my favorites is, uh, from one of my mentors, teacher's Kate Griffel, she used huckleberry, struckleberry, po. So huck, Cold berry str berry poe and it starts slow.
Philippe Hall: Huckleberry str berry poe.
Matt Edwards: That's right. Then you speed it up, you get huckleberry strel berry poe, huckleberry strel berry po. Then we do really quick pitches eventually. So Huckleberry St. Strel Berry Poe Huckleberry str
Philippe Hall: po Huckleberry Strel berry Poe. Yeah, that str is a little bit's. That's where my, my movement wanted to slow down.
Huckleberry Sturrell. Huckleberry Sturrell. Huckleberry Poe.
Matt Edwards: Yeah. And everybody has a different part of it that ends up challenging them. And we feel it different days. I mean, you know, if you feel just groggy and dragging, you may be like, well that normally feels fine, but you realize like your whole body's fatigued and your tongue just doesn't want to move.
Like the rest of your body doesn't want to move either.
Philippe Hall: Yeah. I am. I'm totally loving this. Um.
Concluding Thoughts and Invitation to Further Discussion
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Philippe Hall: We're gonna have to wrap up the live stream because we're gonna jump into private zoom call So if you'd like to continue, um talking with us on a private zoom call, maybe ask us Matt, some questions, get some feedback from Matt, myself on your singing, on your tongue articulation.
Uh, go, go to the link in the description of this live stream and you'll be able to access the vibe, uh, private community [00:43:00] and then join a private zoom call. So I'd like to invite you all to do that. Um, I'm going to ask Matt a question in our next meeting because I'm noticing. A question specifically about this, in this, uh, partnership between the jaw and the tongue and, and taking that now where we've talked about how to get the articulation that these are great exercises that people really, really do them.
It's going to, it will completely transform your singing and they're very simple, but not easy. So be concentrated during your practice, execute cleanly, give yourself some time. So we're going to jump over to that next call. I want to thank you, Matt. This was so much fun. Um, great tips. Thanks so much for being part of the voice five.
Matt Edwards: Yeah. Thanks for having me again. I always love to talk about this. And, uh, you know, if you have questions or want to find more details, I do some of this stuff on Tik TOK. You can find me on Tik TOK, but I go through some of these exercises as well. [00:44:00] Cause I like to share this content to help other singers, such as Edwards underscore voice.
You can find me doing these over there. And then if you have specific questions, you know, I try to reply as I can. And uh answer and give people help because I know that it's one thing to hear it on a podcast It's another to take it back to the practice room and actually do it.
Philippe Hall: Yes. Absolutely. You do have a great tiktok channel I I like your content's awesome.
I'm like, man, matt's killing it over there doing such a great job So definitely check that out. Give matt a follow and um, his tips are worth gold people So thanks again matt. We'll get on that private call and continue this Alright everybody, tune in next week on The Voice Vibe. Have a great day.
