https://newschoolsinger.com/2019/01/03/relax-your-hold/
THE NEW SCHOOL SINGER.
This is a better cue than “relax”, 99% of the time.
It’s important to be specific. When it comes to cues, it’s extra important. What is a cue? A cue is a word you use to make easier for you to unleash a sequence of events. Cues are powerful mental tools for a singer because you can train yourself to respond to cues in profound ways, and every time you use them they get stronger. You can even take a bunch of cues and train those to be triggered by a “master” cue. You probably already use cues if you study with a teacher.
Example: “lift your soft palate”. It’s a cue and not a command because if you just take someone off the street and you tell them that, you have no idea what will happen next. When your teacher says that before you start a phrase or whatever, it means something to you because you spent time together discussing it, and then learning some movements, and then agreeing together that these movements are “lifting the soft palate”.
Another common cue is “relax your jaw”. I really hate this cue a lot. Relaxation means two things and we never know which unless you tell us what you mean. One type of relaxation is physical – literally a muscle that is contracted becomes longer and it’s relaxed free of physical tension. You can sometimes make this happen by taking command of a certain body part. If you move your thumb now, you are doing just that – and you’re using both tension and relaxation.
In singing you can’t ever control all the pieces at once. It’s like herding cats. Get your hips settled and by then you shoulder has wandered off. When you are controlling a body part directly, it can be physically relaxed, but your mental hold on that body part is not relaxed at all. If you have a mental hold on your jaw and you are tensing it, and you relax your mental hold, it might relax physically or it might not. In either case, your focus is on your jaw and your mental tension is directed there.
When you tense up your leg, you generally relax it by kind of… ignoring it a bit. You pull away your attention and the tension leaves with it. A lot of stuff you do is like that, so over time they start to feel like one thing. If you’re in charge of making words you might call them one thing. But when you have jaw tension during singing, is it because you are making it tense like you would your leg or thumb right now? On purpose like that?
On top of it all, we have an emotional state called relaxed, we have states of overall attentiveness that are more or less relaxed, and we also use relaxed to mean “permissive”. But hopefully the teacher has eliminated these by talking about physical relaxation.
So far so good? No, because of what happens next, in practice. The teacher will direct the student to consciously control the jaw, and to take it from a state of physical tension to physical relaxation. Next they move on to some exercises and the student is directed to consciously relax the jaw, while singing. It all seems great, but what’s the cue, really? Is it really just a cue to relax the jaw physically?
Is this confusing to the student, because the jaw tension is now being treated like some kind of action the student is doing on purpose?
We have two possible states (relaxed, not relaxed), and we have two possible subjects (conscious/unconscious control, muscular tension). So when you tell me to relax my jaw I have four possible meanings, and you have four possible meanings. If you haven’t thought that out and you believe in only one meaning, and you made it much harder for me to sing because I now have a cue for focusing on my jaw whenever I start to get into trouble.
If you cue yourself to focus on your jaw when you get into trouble, you will almost always create jaw tension in your performance because you can never afford to sing to your own jaw in front of people. If you think about it, it’s kinda rude to sing to your own jaw when I’m standing right here trying to share this moment with you. Also though, the energy we are sharing can’t fit there. If you send it to your jaw it’s going to just slam into it and get tight AF.
So how about a good cue? Well if we learn the mental trick of relaxing our conscious control of something by directing our attention elsewhere (you relax your conscious control of your body every time you ride a bike and it’s… um… like riding a bike), we can definitely use it in powerful ways. I check in with my jaw all the time. If it’s looking a bit tense I know what to do, but I can’t do it while keeping conscious control of my jaw.
I relax my hold on my jaw, lips, and face muscles, then do the things I do to improve my overall position first, and then make a move to improve the sound. There’s an order of things. And you have to know about the mental switching if you want to cue it. Relaxing your hold doesn’t do anything except relax your hold. It can’t fix anything. The thing you were focused on might get tighter when you relax your hold on it. It doesn’t make you physically relax. But it does let you move on to fixing the root cause, or getting back to the audience that’s been waiting for you ever since like two phrases ago.
For jaw tension, assuming you got rid of your jaw cue, you’ve got to relax your mental hold of the lips. You’ve got to take an overall position that makes the lip position you want extremely easy (you can add something from the face as long as it’s not against the flow). Then you can tune it to the note you are singing. Your jaw will not even get the idea of becoming tense.
PS – sorry Reddit dude stole your meme and can’t find it to give you credit. Come claim it haha
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Submitted January 03, 2019 at 04:00PM by pcastagner http://bit.ly/2CODeG9
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