Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you. 

A common complaint that I hear is about long notes. “They’re too long. They’re too hard. They’re too big. I feel awkward. I don’t like them. I don’t like long notes. I just don’t.”

And what I notice students doing sometimes is just, you know, refusing to sing them – just cutting them off shorter, getting out of them, or collapsing time in the course of a phrase. So instead of holding the note the full length, they’ll just hold it for as long as they want and then move on with the rest of the phrase, which can sometimes mess with the accompaniment, if you’re not accompanying yourself.

So I want to talk about long notes today, why we don’t like them always, and give you some strategies for navigating them better.

I want to say, “strategies for learning to like them.” I don’t know that I can help you learn to like them with this podcast, but I hope I can give you ways to make it through them.

When I ask my students, “Tell me about the long notes, why don’t you like them?” I hear a bunch of different reasons, and they’re all very human. Probably the most common has to do with being afraid of being seen or heard.

One student said, “If I’m singing a long note, then people are going to notice that I’m singing,” which, yeah, is true and is sort of a funny idea. The idea that singing shorter notes, people wouldn’t think you were singing, but there’s something about holding a long note that requires you to take up more space in the world, to use more breath, to have a stable presence about you in order to sustain that note.

And that can feel really intimidating, especially if you’re a shy, quiet type, especially if you’ve been judged for your singing by other people at other times.

And you are afraid of criticism for really good reasons, because you’ve heard some criticism that really hurt you. It all makes sense why you don’t want to sing a long note, and they’re there, and you’re already singing, so let’s work on that.

Another thing that I’ve heard is that long notes feel more important. All of a sudden, when there’s a long note, the song takes on a kind of gravity that just feels too hard to carry. Like, “I’m not worthy of the song,” is kind of the feeling. “It’s too much.” There’s something too much about it.

“Too hard. I’m not big enough. I’m not experienced enough.” Something like that. These are all really good lines of thought to spend some time with if you find yourself resisting long notes.

What is it exactly?

Is it about who I think I am, what I think the song is? Is it about my fear of being seen or heard or judged? And to just get familiar with that. Because those fears are real. They’re human. They’re part of being alive. And they kind of don’t go away. We just get better at managing them.

There’s one thing that I’ve, this may be obvious, what I feel I need to say, you are already visible, you are already audible, and people have already judged you.

So if you go on and sing a long note, or sing a song with lots of long notes in it, nothing about that’s really changing, because you’ve been visible, audible, and judged already.

I don’t know if that makes it any easier, but it’s, it’s certainly true.

There have been times in my life when I have really suffered with the realization that I wasn’t somebody’s type. That somebody just didn’t like me. That they thought I was an idiot or, I don’t know if they thought I was an idiot, I thought they thought I was an idiot. They didn’t like me and that really made me sad.

Sometimes it really made me angry. But after a while, after like the sixth or seventh or tenth or twelfth person who really doesn’t like you, for me anyway, I, I finally settled into this understanding that I’m not everyone’s type. And nobody is everyone’s type.

There’s a safety there. There’s a comfort there, that my singing, my way of cooking polenta, my, I don’t know, my anything, doesn’t have to please everybody.

I feel more freedom in my artistic expression anyway, when I can just acknowledge, Not everybody’s gonna like this. What’s important is do I like it? Do I feel like me? Do I feel in integrity with myself, with my artistic vision, with my ideas about how the song should go?

That’s what’s really important. And in order to know that, in order to know, does this feel like me, I have to be willing to be with myself. I have to be willing to see myself and to hear myself and to withstand my own self-criticism.

I find that’s a much more fruitful place to put my attention than worrying about what other people think. First of all, what do I think? What do I feel? How do I sound? And start there.

Of course, that in itself is a process because we don’t always know how we feel or what we sound like, and that’s a big reason for taking voice lessons, is to have somebody outside of your head, outside of your body, across the room, who can tell you whether you’re doing what you think you’re doing, whether you’re having the impact you think you’re having, whether it’s working, whether you’re using your body as well as you possibly can.

So again, this is a human project, right? Learning how to be a person with a heart and desire and ideas, intellectual commitments, how to hold all of that creativity and meaningfully share it with other people.

It’s something we get better at doing the more we do it, and that of course, is a risk. Whenever you share yourself creatively, there’s a risk that the person isn’t going to like it, that you’re going to be misunderstood, and we have to keep sharing.

We have to keep finding people we think we’re a good fit for and sharing what’s on our heart, what’s in our mind, and what’s in our voice.

So there’s a little psychological pep talk for you in terms of singing long notes, but I would like to give you some technical tips that help them go better.

Let’s start with how we manage time when we’re singing. So, songs have a beat, they have a tempo, and that might sound like 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4… That might be the tempo of a song. And then a long note, in that context, might be, just for the sake of argument, let’s just say four beats long.

So you’ve got a long note. It’s four beats long. That means it’s gonna last one, two, three, four. And it’s really easy when you see a long note on the page, or you know that one is coming, it’s really easy to think that you just need to hit it and hold it, and then you’re done.

Kind of like playing a piano, where you find the key that you want to hit, you press your finger down on it, and you hold your finger down until you don’t want to hear that note anymore.

So there’s one big effort at the beginning, and then the rest is just waiting.

Singing like that, with that kind of pianistic approach, is really not satisfying to listen to, or to do, because it’s very hard on the body. When we’re singing, the sound that we’re making is created by the free flow of breath up from your lungs past your vocal folds.

And whenever there’s a kind of holding feeling in your throat, in your chest, that’s resistance in the system that is not helping. In order to hold a pitch for any length of time, we do have to control the exhalation, but that happens from our abs. That happens in your trunk, in your belly. That doesn’t happen in your chest, or your throat, or your head, or your nose, or your left big toe. That happens in your belly.

So, we need to feel the effort, not just at the beginning of the note, but throughout the note. And one way to trick, cajole, inspire your body to do that is to sing all the little parts of the big note.

So if we have a whole note, four beats long, there are four quarter notes in that note. I’ll make you a lip trill so you can hear what I’m talking about.

Trill

So there’s my four beat note. One way to think about it is

Trill-trill-trill-trill

Now I emphasized each of those beats for effect. When you’re singing, it won’t sound like that, but you, you want to have that quality of energy happening in your belly for each of those quarter notes.

Trill-trill-trill-trill

Again, that pulsing is coming from my belly. I’m not making it in my throat. Here’s what that would sound like.

Trill-trill-trill-trill

When I listened to the recording, I’ll hear whether or not that sounds any different. What I can tell you for in my body is when I try to pulse the note, control the note from my throat, everything feels like it just gets smaller and it feels less, way less fun. It starts to feel like a struggle.

Now certainly long notes can go on for longer than four beats. They can go on for eight beats, 16 beats. Yeah, longer than 16, not really common in vocal music. 12 beats might be the longest you find. I don’t know.

Send me, if you have a really long note that you struggle with, send me an email about it. I would love to see what’s the longest note you’ve ever encountered, that you’re trying to tackle.

So throughout the long note, however long it is, you want to maintain a connection to your belly, and I really think it’s worth your time to practice the note on something like a lip trill or a V,

VVVV

where you put your top teeth against your lower lip and you hold the note that way.

VVVV

And again, I’m pulsing that note from my belly, not from grabbing with my teeth. Here’s what grabbing with my teeth would sound like:

VVVV

Not so good. When you practice the long note on a lip trill, it’s generally easier. If you can

Trill

VVV

Or ZZZ is also a really good one

zzzzz, zzzzz is also a really good one.

I notice for myself that when I have a long passage to sing or a long note to quote unquote hold, if I practice it first with a semi-occluded sound, like a lip trill, a vvv, a zzz, that when I go to sing a vowel on the note, it’s easier.

Now, for some notes, so we’ve been using the example of a whole note, four beats long, you might need more help than that. You might feel like the note is still dying. It still doesn’t have direction. It still feels like it’s, weighing on you. It still doesn’t feel fun. You can add more micro-beats.

So instead of pulsing quarter notes, you can pulse eighth notes.

Trill

I don’t know if you can hear that. I can feel that in my belly

Dat, dat, dat, dat, dat, dat, dat, dat, instead of dat, dat, dat, dat, or the dreaded dat that then doesn’t go anywhere because you only, you put all of your focus at the very beginning of the note.

And sometimes it’s fun instead of straight eighths to pulse triplets, so to have that going on in your brain while you’re holding

Trill (123, 123, 123, 123)

Just that simple idea, turning one big thing into a bunch of smaller things can make it seem more manageable than before.

Another strategy you might employ is to intentionally relax your jaw, open your mouth, create more height inside your head by raising your soft palate, or just having the thought, “I’m growing taller,” as you hold the note.

So you’re maybe beginning the note with a medium sized mouth in the front. And then as you hold the note, you’re letting your jaw drop and your palate raise so that by the time you get to the end of the note, your mouth is a good two fingers open.

So you stack two fingers on top of each other and put that between your teeth and let that be your, the end bigness of your mouth. And you start the note with a slightly smaller mouth.

So you’re giving your body something to do. I mean, I’ve already explained that your abs have something to do while you’re holding the note, right? Which is to support it and be engaged. But you’re giving your jaw, which will, does have a tendency to hold on to things for dear life – you’re giving your jaw something to do.

You’re giving your jaw a way to move, and when it’s moving, it can’t hold, it can’t grab, and that, getting rid of that extra tension makes long notes easier to sing.

It also helps to have a clear destination for the note that you’re singing. So, the notes are leaving your mouth, all the time when you’re singing. The notes are coming out of your mouth.

But when we have to hold a note for a long period of time, it also helps to have a clear destination for the long note – a clear idea of where you want that note to land. I mean literally in the room that you’re singing in.

So when songs have lots of quick notes, telling a story. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, daaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Okay, until we got to the long note, all of those short little notes, they could feel like they’re just sort of falling at your feet, right?

Maybe they’re gently making it down, three or four feet away from you. But when you get to the

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah,

it’s probably the composer’s intention that that note have an effect on the listener. That long note is there because we want to grab the listener’s attention in some way.

And so when you can plan that that note is going to reach across the room, it’s not just falling at your feet like the short notes, but it’s really traveling away from you and you can see it arriving at a destination.

You can do this by picking a spot on the wall across the room, picking an object in the room that you’re going to sing to, that you’re going to send that long note to that thing and you can even tell yourself that you’re going to make that thing wiggle.

That note is going, not just going to arrive there and sort of gently touch the object or that part of the wall that you’re focused on, but that that sound is going to have an effect on that thing when it gets there.

And that can help you keep your energy up and keep your focus up. And it means that you’re thinking about the entire length of the note, not just the beginning and not just the end. You’re trying to guarantee that that sound is going to arrive safely somewhere. That can be really helpful.

You can also think about the path that note may take. It doesn’t have to arrive there in a straight line. Some of my students have found it helpful to imagine, as they’re singing a long note, that it’s kind of traveling along a curvy highway, like there are several turns before it gets to its destination.

And that image has helped them stay engaged with the note, engaged with their breath, giving it everything it needs to be as full and beautiful as the music requires it to be.

My last idea about long notes is to consider what picture you may be painting with that note. So if we think about a song as something that tells a story, we’re trying to create images in the minds of people whoare listening to us. We’re painting pictures of a kind. It’s not a one dimensional experience.

There is color in how we sing. There are shapes when we’re singing that we’re making. Shapes of melodies, maybe shapes with your hands if you, if you’re the kind of person who gesticulates a lot, but also shapes in terms of the story.

And so when you get to that long note that is probably important because it’s long, what do you want people to see as they hear it?

Now, you might have an idea from the text.

Okay, famous long notes, “And I will always love you,” by Dolly Parton, made famous by Whitney Houston. [singing] “And I will always love you.” Right? They’re great big long notes that are usually sung much higher than that.

But as you’re holding that I, “and I,” what do you want them to see as you’re singing that I? Do you want them to see your big, beautiful heart that will always be loving them? Do you want them to see this gorgeous outfit that you’re wearing? Do you want them to see the house where you were born? What do you want them to see?

It can be anything, it doesn’t have to be related to the song. But once you make that decision, that you want them to see something, and you have a specific something in mind now, your brain has something to do, as your abs are helping you support that note, and your breath is continuing to flow.

You have a clear idea of what that sound, the meaning that sound is imparting. And that’s another way to stay engaged, and to make that note as interesting as possible.

So, I hope this is helpful.

I want you to know that if you’re afraid of long notes, if you hate long notes, you just dread them, you are not alone. You are so not alone. Somebody, somewhere, right this minute is having that very feeling. And we have those feelings because it’s part of the human condition. It’s just part of what it is to be a singer.

And the more curious you can get about why you’re resisting the thing, why you don’t like the thing, the easier it will be to conquer the thing.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.

That’s letters at M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.

Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.