Roger Love with Donna Frazier . LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY Boston New York London Copyright © 1999 by Roger Love All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. First Edition Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Love, Roger. Set your voice free / by Roger Love. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-316-44179-! i. Singing Methods Self-Instruction. 2. Voice. I. Title. MT893.L68 1999 783'.04 — dczi 99-10081 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Q-FG Book design by All Points Covered Printed in the United States of America This book is dedicated to SYLVIA, MIYOKO, AND MADISON, who love me enough to forgive when I sometimes hit a wrong note. Foreword THE VERY last thing I thought I'd ever need was a singing coach. After all, I've never been able to carry a tune. But several years ago, a string of events led me to Roger Love, and I will be forever grateful for the changes he's made in my voice. Let me go back to the beginning. In December of 1996 I got a bad cold — several weeks of postnasal drip topped off with Christmastime bronchitis and laryngitis. It seemed to clear up, and then, one night, right after doing a great three-hour show, I got up to leave the studio and found that I could barely croak out a "See you tomorrow" to my engineer. I was stunned! What had happened to my voice? I'm a radio talk show host and a virtual chatter machine except when I'm sleeping, so for me this was no casual loss. I have to have my voice. My husband took me to the Speech Pathology Clinic at UCLA, where they used a special device to watch my vocal cords as they worked. As worried as I was, it was fascinating to see my cords undulating right there on the television monitor. The cords were red and swollen, but the diagnosis was a relief: it was simply laryngitis. They recommended two weeks of silence. Two weeks of silence?! It was almost unthinkable. I didn't go gently into that two weeks — this is my career we're talking about. And in spite of what the doctors said, that this was just a virus, I kept worrying that I might be dealing with a recurring or chronic problem. Let's just say that when you play the violin professionally, even a slight wrist problem can loom as a huge potential threat. I was relieved to have a voice when I was finally allowed to talk. One problem, though. I couldn't figure out how to use it, or where it was in pitch and tone. Believe it or not, I had forgotten how to talk normally. Afraid that I'd have another relapse, I spoke softly and low, thinking that was the way to protect my throat. I was so careful that I became self-conscious about every speaking moment. I didn't dare risk inflections or volume, which robbed my presentation of all of its usual playfulness. A few program directors who heard me during that time remarked to my company that I sounded depressed. I probably was. My husband thought I needed some rehabilitation to get back my confidence and vocal strength, and our exercise trainer mentioned that his daughter was taking singing lessons from a fellow who, she said, "is a genius at helping people with vocal problems." That person was Roger Love. I grudgingly went, feeling as though this would probably be about as useful as going to a witch doctor. I was wrong. At my first lesson, Roger asked me why I was whispering. I told him I was afraid of hurting my voice. He explained the interplay of vocal cords and air and told me that too much air (as in whispering) damages, instead of protects, the cords. I almost fainted. He went through a series of vocal exercises with me, an expression of great concentration on his face, as though he could hear each individual vibration. Frankly, I think he can. He told me the state of my vocal cords (healthy) and that he could help me find and improve my normal speaking voice. Once a week for an hour, we worked at the piano with exercises I found challenging and a little embarrassing. He gave me a practice warm-up tape to use each day before the program. And he reassured me that I had a vocal apparatus of iron and that I should trust it. It took several months, but I regained both my confidence and my vocal strength and placement. Roger was patient and kind — and boy, did he know his stuff! I am grateful for his expertise and humanity. In the years since our meeting, I have had only one head cold that took out my voice (thanks to my twelve-year-old son's generosity with viruses), and Roger was right there every day, doing exercises aimed at stretching the swelling out of the cords. I missed only one day of work, and that was simply out of caution. Roger Love is incredibly knowledgeable and experienced with both the speaking and the singing voice. He knows what to do to help with just about any voice problem. That makes him a master mechanic. What makes him even more special is his sincere concern for people. He'll help you through emergencies and keep you going with pep talks. It is a fact that his many years of experience with thousands of voices, combined with his G_d-given abilities, make Roger the incredible voice "therapist" that he is. If it's broken, he'll help you fix it, and if it's not broken, he'll help you make it better. I started out a cynic. I ended up a grateful student. I had never realized how much our ability to speak comfortably and correctly matters to our psyches and our effectiveness in communication. My experience with Roger's teaching has been productive and enjoyable. I'm certain that your experience with this book will be no less. DR. LAURA SCHLESSINGER Internationally syndicated radio talk show host, author of The Ten Commandments: The Significance of God's Laws in Everyday Life; Why Do You Love Me?; How Could You Do That?! The Abdication of Character, Courage, and Conscience; Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives; and Ten Stupid Things Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives 1 Your Best Voice YOUR VOICE is an intimate part of you. A breath of air travels through your body, taking on the colors of your thoughts and emotions, and when it re-emerges it's filled with your essence. Something that intimate should be as strong, sweet, pure, seductive, funny, and commanding as you are. But words like strong, warm, sexy, and powerful may not be the ones that pop into mind when you listen to the voice you've recorded on your phone answering machine, or the one you've tried to prod through a chorus of "Happy Birthday." In fact, when I ask most people to describe their own speaking voices, the typical list is full of brutal assessments: thin, harsh, gravelly, hoarse, weak, nasal, tinny. And when it comes to singing, they couldn't be tougher on themselves: "I'm no Pavarotti, that's for sure." "Can't carry a tune in a bucket." "Tone deaf." "Fingernails on a blackboard." "I don't sing. Can't sing. Don't ask." I believe that many of us are trapped in voices that don't begin to convey who we really are. We think we're shy, but actually we feel beaten down by the way other people have reacted — or failed to react — when they've listened to us. In our minds, James Earl Jones or Lauren Bacall is speaking our thoughts, but too often what comes out of our mouths is anything but. Maybe your voice is hoarse or strained; maybe it's more like Pee Wee Herman's. Maybe you're soft-spoken, like a librarian, but you're ready to unleash the vocal exotic dancer. You'd be surprised at how often the voice just doesn't convey our passions, our convictions, our affection, or our intentions. And you'll be amazed to see what happens when you learn how to let it. A Powerful New Tool I'd like to show you how to find your true voice, the voice that is as rich and full and beautiful and exciting as you are. I've spent the last twenty years developing specific techniques for enriching every voice and helping speakers and singers solve the problems, both common and rare, that stand between them and the voices they were born to have. The tools I'll share with you in this book and the accompanying CD are the same ones I've used with clients such as the Beach Boys, Def Leppard, Chicago, Matchbox 20, the Jacksons, Earth Wind and Fire, the 5th Dimension, Wilson Phillips, Phish, and Hanson; as well as speakers and actors like radio's Dr. Laura Schlessinger, John Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus), Anthony Robbins (Personal Power); and actors like John Sta-mos, Victoria Principal, Christopher Lambert, and Martin Landau. These are people who depend on their voices — and will do anything they can to protect and develop them. Often, when they call, they need help fast. So, as you'll see, the lessons in this book are designed to show dramatic results in minutes, days, and weeks — not years. Many of my clients can afford to go anywhere they want and to study any technique ever devised, but they come to me because I have developed the most specific, effective exercises that exist for opening up the voice to all its possibilities. They know that in one lesson I can give them access to parts of their voices they've never been able to reach and that they might not have known existed. Let me give you a few examples of just how powerful this technique is: The record-company executive who called me needed a miracle. Six months earlier, a • talented new trio had begun recording what was to be its first single, and now, as they were in the midst of laying down the finishing tracks, the thirteen-year-old lead singer's voice had changed. Everyone loved his boy-soprano sound, and the record label thought it might just be a major key to the group's success. But no one had been able to find a way for him to hit the same stratospheric high notes now that his voice had dropped an octave overnight. Generally, because of improper vocal technique, most young men never regain easy access to the upper reaches of their prepuberty voice. This one, though, was desperate to try. That night I met Taylor Hanson, listened to his attempts to sing, and gave him specific exercises to put him back in control of his vocal cords and reestablish his connection to the high notes he thought he'd never sing again. Thirty minutes later, with his family and the record company executives nervously looking on, we successfully managed to get on tape nearly all the high parts of the song that had been so impossible for him before we met. The song, "MMM Bop," went on to be one of the biggest singles of 1998, and the Hansons' first album has sold more than nineteen million copies, reaching number one in more than thirty countries. A highly successful prime-time TV star (to protect his privacy, I'll call him Larry) • developed a throat infection. He lost his voice and went to an ear, nose, and throat specialist, who advised complete vocal rest for several weeks. Larry took that news like a death sentence — the entire show would have to come to a halt while he recovered, and the network was pressuring him to meet deadlines for new shows that were scheduled to be taped. But because he was a pro and a perfectionist, he followed doctor's orders and spent his weeks in silence, communicating only with a pencil and a pad of paper. At the end of this time, Larry was almost afraid to talk. He was terrified to find out what he'd sound like when he opened his mouth again. And he was also afraid that the voice that had let him down once would do it again. Larry didn't even recognize the sounds he was making when he began to speak. His voice didn't have the thickness and power he remembered. It sounded almost wispy — and it didn't sound like him. He was agitated, and extremely nervous, when he arrived at my studio. After less than an hour of vocal exercises, Larry's voice had regained its resonance, and we'd actually built on the strengths of his old voice to give it more power. Larry was back on the air two days later — receiving rave reviews for the greater amount of character and personality that came through when he spoke. His new-found vocal prowess gave him so much confidence, it translated effortlessly into a positive change that radiated through both his personal and his professional life. I've found that by using singing exercises to help people improve the way they speak, I can make bigger leaps much more quickly than even a speech pathologist might. That's because singing helps you bypass the logical, skeptical left side of the brain. Instead, when you take a chance and sing sounds for me, you tap into the creative, playful right side of the brain — the side that's ready to believe you can fly. Finally, I'd like to tell you the story of someone you've never heard of. He's never • won a Grammy or appeared on TV, but I consider my work with him to be among my proudest achievements. Owen, a young college student, wanted to sing. He had an exuberant personality, and you couldn't help but be happy to be around him, but when he tried to sing along with the radio, people would cringe. All his life, people had told him he was tone deaf, and to hear him, you might have said so too. Owen's was one of the most difficult cases I've ever encountered. When he tried to sing anything higher than his regular speaking voice, he could hardly make a sound. His face would turn bright red, and only a tiny wisp of sound would come out. His larynx, the housing for the vocal cords, was so high that it was blocking his throat, and he was holding his stomach muscles so tightly that it was as if he were holding his breath the whole time he was trying to sing. I showed him a very simple set of low-larynx exercises — the same ones I'll show you — and in thirty seconds his larynx moved to a normal position, the back part of his throat opened up, and the pressure in his head and throat disappeared. Next I taught him some simple breathing exercises, and suddenly he wasn't holding his breath while trying to sing. Those two simple techniques allowed him to experience the freedom of letting his voice travel unconstricted out of his body. Now I had to get him on pitch. Here we were starting from ground zero. When I hit a note on the piano and asked him to repeat it, he'd blast out a pitch that was way off in left field. People waiting for their lessons would hear his attempts through the door and comment on them after he left. "Why does that guy want to take singing lessons?" they'd ask. "You're stealing his money." But Owen persisted. It took him a while to realize that when he was hitting a wrong note he could steer his way back to the right one — while he was singing. Like a lot of people, he had the tendency to stop, or worse, plow on in the wrong direction, when his sound went sour. We worked on simple pitch-correcting exercises for several weeks, and a month later people were standing with their ears pressed to the door to hear the fabulous singer who was practicing with me. It was Owen. Once his throat was open and he'd learned to correct his pitches, he could open his voice to all the life that was in his heart and let his true personality come through. The result was incredibly moving. Great speaking and singing is not about being the best. It's about being unique. It's about expressing who you are and what's particularly special about you. If you learn to use your own instrument with confidence, people will open their ears to you and recognize what sets you apart from everyone else. Whether you're singing a lullaby to your baby, saying a prayer, making a toast, spontaneously bursting into song, or giving the presentation that can make or break your career, your voice will reveal what you most genuinely want to convey. That's the best kind of success there is. It's my pleasure, and my mission, to help you find it. Voice Lessons? They're Not about Talent People tend to be afraid of the term voice lessons because it makes them think of being locked up in a room with a stuffy old guy who has a metronome ticking in the background, a perfectionist who will crack the whip over something as natural as the sound that comes out of their mouths. "Who needs voice lessons?" we ask ourselves, certain that the answer doesn't include us. "I know how to talk, and I can't sing, so what's the point? Lessons are for people with talent!" But using your voice well isn't always about having special gifts, or performing or being the star of your church or family or community production. At the deepest level, the reason we need to develop the voice is to allow it to be as expressive and flexible as possible, because when you do that, you're setting your voice, and yourself, free. What Your Voice Says about You The sounds coming out of your mouth set up a whole range of expectations about how you'll behave, how accessible you are, what your sense of humor is like, and how high your energy level is — to name just a few of the qualities we encode in our voices. Think of the times you've "met" someone over the phone and created a whole visual picture of him or her, just from the vocal personality that slides through the fiber optic cable. (Ever set up a meeting by phone with someone you were sure was "tall, dark, and distinguished," only to find yourself shocked to be shaking hands a couple days later with the nerdy-looking little guy who owns the great voice? That mental image-making, based solely on sound, is the power of speech and the literal vibrations, positive or negative, that precede us.) We absorb the information packed into a voice almost intuitively. I have spent many years detailing exactly how we telegraph information through sound, independent of the words we use. Whether you realize it or not, your voice hits a lot of pitches as you speak. A friend and student of mine, who happens to be a former rocket scientist, took an interest in the relationship between voice and occupation. For several months, as he traveled the world on business, he carried a small musical keyboard. He'd pull it out during conversations, and he'd use it to figure out what the other person's voice was doing, musically, as he or she spoke. (As we'll see throughout this book, there's a short, easy leap between speaking and singing.) Our voices, at their most expressive points, swoop around, rather than confining themselves to a monotone, and with a little practice, you can hear the various pitches you hit while you're speaking. (You can try this by sitting down at the keyboard and saying the word hello with a lot of enthusiasm, as though you're greeting someone you're surprised and very happy to meet. If you hold the o as though you're chanting it, you might be able to pick out the note that you're speaking/ singing by touching the keys on the keyboard until you find the note that matches the one you're making.) My friend became adept at listening to the pitches (the familiar "do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do" that we've all learned to sing) that people were hitting as they spoke, and he