Here you will be producing your Better Voice without the help of either a hum or a friendly consonant to focus your voice in your head. For these exercises you will need to be able to produce a bright head-focused sound with your mouth open after only a very short ‘m’, ‘n’ or ‘w’.

The aim is to feel the sound has ‘arrived’ without you making any effort to produce it. If you’ve previously controlled your voice from your throat, you may have the disconcerting feeling that you’ve lost control of your voice. This is a good sign! It means you have successfully shifted the focus of your voice to your head, and as you get used to it you will actually have greater control than if you were using your throat. 

Exercise 28: Float the notes

• Imagine you’re about to switch on a hum but don’t make any sound.
• Let your lower jaw drop a little and switch on an effortless aah.
• Switch the sound off in your head while your mouth is still open.
• Repeat the exercise using different notes.

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This exercise is very simple but not necessarily easy. If you feel you’re not getting it you could:

• put a finger on your forehead, as you did for the first humming exercises, to remind you of where you’re visualising the sound; or
• if you feel you’re concentrating too hard, use a distraction technique such as bouncing a ball; or
• check whether the problem is in the way you’re opening your mouth (check back to the troubleshooting in Section 4.3 if necessary).

The next stage is to be able to move to different notes on the ‘floating’ sound. 

Exercise 29: Float next-door notes‍

• Switch on note 1 with an mmmm hum then allow your jaw to drop to produce an aah.
• Keeping the position of your mouth and the sound the same, slide to note 2, slightly higher in pitch, and back to note 1.

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• Next open your mouth onto an aah without the hum first, then do the slide between notes.

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• Now do the whole sequence with the nnnn hum initially, and moving to a lower pitched note.

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• Next, mix and match the two types of hum and higher and lower pitched notes.
• Then, extend the range of notes you move either up or down, as you did in Exercise 27.
• Finally, try the exercise without any preparatory hum at the beginning to focus the tone. This is something else we’ll be doing in detail in Part Two, but have a go now.

Exercise 30: Float next-door spoken vowels

Here’s another opportunity to start using Better Voice when you speak, and to identify different some different sound qualities your voice has.

• Speak a vowel sound on two next-door notes that either fall or rise in pitch.

• For the falling notes try Aah!, with the intonation you’d use if you were saying ‘Aah, what a shame!’.
• For the rising notes try Oooops.
• Then try two falls with arise in the middle. For example, Oh no!, as in ‘Oh no! I’ve dropped my car keys down the drain’.

The important thing is to keep the sound and feel of the two notes the same: bright and focused in your head. Even if you’re a man with a deep voice the sound can be bright – rather than dull or woolly. It will give your voice a lively, energetic quality that people will enjoy listening to.

The voice exercises in Part One are your basic Better Voice toolkit. Keep practising them and you will be developing an effort-free head-focused voice that will gradually become your normal way of using your voice, for singing or for speaking.

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