Master your breath, master your performance! 

Have you ever dreamt of being on stage with the rock solid confidence that comes from knowing that nothing is difficult, or that you never run out of breath? How about knowing exactly how to sing those high notes you have always dreaded without fear? And wouldn't it be lovely to sing without any tension in the throat or jaw? 

No matter what kind of voice type you have, the majority of problems singers have are very often caused by one root problem - but  singers are often unaware of this - since their focus is on the symptoms, NOT the cause.  

I see this every day, when singers come to me for help. They tell me they struggle with high notes, tension, long phrases, embellishments, intervals, uniting different registers, the list goes on. 

NEVER do they come to me and say: 

"It is my breathing that is wrong, and it causes so many other problems." 

However, that is exactly what has been the root problem, every single time. Once you learn how to breathe correctly, you can start solving the other problems, but you cannot do it the other way around. 

Even the singers who had been trained for 10 or 15 years, before they came to me, had NOT learned how to breathe. Most singers today don't learn this most important foundational skill for healthy singing, and this is especially obvious when they try to sing high notes.

One of the greatest opera singers ever, Dame Joan Sutherland, said this about singing technique in a Masterclass in 1995, at Cardiff Singer of the World, and I could not agree more.

"For me, the voice sits on top of the breath, and the singer has to control that breath and project the sound WITHOUT ALLOWING GREAT GULPS OF BREATH TO BE DISBURSED INTO THE AIR WITH THE SOUND.

Your breath is like a plinth on which your voice sits, and you only use a minimal amount of breath to pronounce the words.  The sound is projected through the cavities of the mouth and the resonators of the mask, the face. 

You shouldn't think about larynxes, and false cords, and pharynxes and anything else. I really do feel that there's far too much physiology talk in voice production." (Dame Joan Sutherland, 1995)