The two exercises here are the next step in being able to use your Better Voice on a range of different notes.

First, with the help of the consonants ‘m’, ‘n’ and ‘w’ in the friendly phrases, you will master moving from one note to another without humming. In the second exercise you will practise increasing the range of notes and the intervals between them.

Warm up for these exercises by doing some simple humming first. 

Exercise 26: Many, many next-door notes

• Pick a comfortable note (we’ll call it note 1) then think of its next-door note about a tone higher in pitch (note 2).
• Switch on note 1 and sing Many.
• Slide gently and slowly along your horizontal line of notes and sing many on note 2.
• Slide gently and slowly back to sing men on note 1.
• Start by doing a slurred version of the phrase, then gradually make the words clearer and move more quickly between the two notes.

‍

‍

• Do the same exercise again, but this time moving to a note that is slightly lower in pitch, and back again (e.g. note 2 to note 1 back).

‍

• Repeat the same sequence using other friendly phrases until the sound you make is smooth and flowing on all of them.

Exercise 27: The next stage

We’ll be going into the detail of how to increase the range of your Better Voice, how to cross intervals between notes, and how to deal with breaks in your voice, in Part Two of the course, but here’s a way you can start the process:

Once you are able to keep a good head-focused tone in all the variations of Exercise 26, you can:

• Increase, one at a time, the number of notes you use. For now avoid any note sequences that include a noticeable break in your voice.
• Increase, very gradually, the interval between notes. Slide between the notes smoothly rather than making a jump: dividing the interval up into lots of smaller intervals gives you the best chance of keeping a head-focused tone.

So you might, for example, work towards singing five notes with alternate intervals of a tone and a minor third between them, to the friendly phrase Why O Why O Why. Work on this exercise along with the exercises in the following section.

When you start a new note/interval combination always start by using a simple consonant/vowel combination (e.g. ma, noo), and work towards using a friendly phrase.

‍