So I want to, I wanna give you a few tips. Imagine, imagine stuff is going a little bit awry in the studio and you need something to call upon. Â Keep that song segment in your head, right? Remember how it felt at the start. Â Remember how it feels now after the warmup makes some notes about, Hey, hang on, how does my voice feel now? Is it better? Is it worse? Â Either way? If it’s one or the other, it’s gonna tell you a lot about your singing, right?
So for it to get worse is not a bad thing. It just tell, at least you now know what’s not good for you. ’cause not everything is made for everyone, right?  So troubleshooting,  imagine your voice gets a bit cloudy on the day.  It’s a bit rough,  and it’s been coming to that just about an hour in  maybe even 45 minutes. It’s getting a little, losing a little bit of clarity.  That’s your cue to change your behaviour and reset.
 So we can feel pressure to push past this point. It’s getting rough.  Often the producer might say, sounds really good when it’s rough,  but, you know, yeah, but I know it’s gonna go downhill shortly after this. So it’s a good idea to take if you can  make an excuse, take a little bit of control, um, and jump out of the booth  as soon as that starts happening. Look, five minutes is not a problem. Couple, you know, 10 minutes is not a problem.
But if you register it, try and factor in that break at the, at the nearest possible point, because that cloudiness is the potential for inflammation to happen on that voice. And we can interject at that point. So on the screen there, you’ll notice that there’s two ways to look at this at very basic terms. One is, if you are a, if you’re a chesty belty singer, if you are quite loud and and raucous, Â it’s often that behaviour that we need to turn on its head for just a second.
So we need to flip it upside down and start to come take a break,  siren from the top down like this.  Ooh, Just pop to the loo and do this. Right? But either way, belt belty stuff is like taking the bottom register and pulling it higher up to give you that kind of call quality. So we need to do the opposite falsetto  or a very light sound, Ooh. And come from the top down.
And that’s a way to just begin to reset this behaviour so that in another 10 minutes you could go back in the booth maybe, and it starts to feel like it did half an hour, 40 minutes before. Â Conversely, if you are quite a breathy soft singer and you notice your voice is getting a little bit rough, Â again, take a break, but we wanna be doing the other side of it. We want to be in your speech type sounds. Um, um, something where the mouth is closed, a little bit of this, Uh, Just for 10 or 15 seconds or so, that kind of resets as gets as low and rich again, Â which is the opposite to being, Ah, Kind of soft and breathy.
So with, with each type of singing, we kind of wanna  do the opposite thing for five minutes.
If we feel it’s gonna get cloudy, Â like I said, take yourself off to the toilet if that’s gonna work for you. Â Let’s say we’re, we’re doing okay actually with clarity, but there’s a high note problem or with straining a little bit. Now, if there’s something in your sample song that you are doing at the moment, um, sing that song piece again, Â but sing it with your hands directly above your head. Â Sing that song segment and just notice if that makes the change to the sound.
 If it does,  listen, you can do this in a recording studio because we are not on stage and they’re like, what you doing? And you’re like, just trust me,  it will work. So try singing with your hands above your head. And if that makes a change to the strain, you’ll know you have something to call upon in the studio.  Another one is to  bring your tongue slightly forward  and try and sing. You’ve gotta make it sound the right way.
This takes experimenting before you take it into the studio, right? But  I’ve been so many, I’ve been so many places.  That’s me bringing my tongue forward and still keeping the purity of the consonants and making sure the owls don’t sound funny. So it takes a bit of listening and practice, but often singers find that their tongue is actually causing an issue and their singing and bringing it forward really helps it. So try that in the song right now.  And lastly,  raising the chin ever so slightly  and sing the same segment with the chin slightly above level,  like a, like, it’s proud.
 And maybe even you could combine this with chin, this with tongue. Either way you can combine all three of those to see if they release some tension for you.  And finally, if you’re losing energy, ’cause it’s a big day  and we’re feeling a bit labored, we need to increase energy.
You may notice that you haven’t eaten for ages. So take on some food, give it time to get in you  if it’s sugary and carby, it doesn’t take long at all, like 20 minutes, 10 minutes. Um, so get some food in you, get some drink. But if you’re kind of nearing the end of the day and you just need to find a little bit of energy,  if you’ve eaten  Three 22nd sprints  on the spot  Can get the breathing system going just enough  for you to have the energetic performance that you can get the, like the last little section out of the day.
So singers often run outta beans halfway through like mammoth 10 hour days, right? And so this brings me to the final tip. Â Just be aware of, it’s not unusual for you to record something that is really hard to sing live. Â This is very common.
I’ve heard this a million times, and which is why when you hear live versions of records, I implore you to listen to live versions of everything that you hear, that you study. Because the live versions, especially if they’re challenging songs are so frequently different.  If it’s a really like raspy singer, there’s often less rasp in the live performances. Because  in the studio we can sing things over and over again. We can take breaks. We only need to sing one word at a time sometimes.
So when we have to do that, Â we can push ourselves often, not always rightly, but we can take our voice to the absolute limit in the studio. Â And we can take things that if we did that song after song on night, it would shred us to bits. But in the studio, we can take bits and bobs of it, compile a take that ultimately is, very difficult to perform live. Â So be aware that when you get to your studio, or sorry, when you get to your stage, Â that modifications to the key, your intensity of singing sometimes modifications to the melody so that you can modify some high notes, Â can frequently happen as part of the live version.
And that is fine, hap millions of artists have done it, don’t worry about it but what that also means is if, um, if studio recordings are usually the most visceral of all of the presentations of the song, Â it means producers and singers, they do push the voice really far in the studio.
And whenever we do that, if we’re sick,  if we’ve done 10 in a row, we’ve had a really busy week,  we can  go for that amazing vocal at times when we could end up with that red vocal fold. Okay? So on so many levels, this tip can  tell us what to expect on stage and to make changes, but also what we can sometimes expect in the studio.
And, and just to not put our voice at risk too often  by trying to get that most insane vocal for, um, the rec the record.  We need breaks and we need to be listening to our own, um, mark as a vocal fatigue.  So write this assignment down. Everything that I’ve said today, you can apply it piecemeal one by one if you want. So if you’ve noticed your lifestyle could do with a change, please make a change to it and just see how it happens.
It’s, it, it might help you, it might not. But either way, try something out and see the result.  Incorporate warmups and resetting your voice, as I’ve discussed today. Maybe that helps you to survive the studio when it becomes a bit tricky  and experiment with those troubleshooting things. Arms up, tongue out,  or chin slightly higher, um, in your home practice. Do that at home so you know what results you get.
And then you can take them into your studios as you go to, and in the community, The Songwriting Academy community.
