Uncensored Improvisation Challenge - Day 5 of 30
Channel: Sven Sebastian Horner
Date: 2024-04-07

Today I saw a video of a singer, who sang so incredibly softly. I suddenly realised that I usually don't sing softly at all. And looking at the videos from day 1 to 4, it also becomes very clear from my facial expressions, how much I work with pressure in my singing. And so I had a mission for today's video. Another 3 hours went into warming up and practising until I started to record. I completely focused on singing as gently and softly as I could. This will take me a while to master technically, but most importanly I got this insight:

Singing gently makes me feel so much more connected to the heart! ❤️ This is a huge realisation for me personally, because after all being close to my heart is my number one reason for singing. So today I teared down a very big wall! Even further, I also noticed the same thing about speaking. My speaking is usually quite hard as well, and it can be softer! I'm just mind-blown.

In more detail I found, that technically, singing with pressure not only makes it sound hard, but it actually makes the muscles harder, and then that leads to the harder sound. Doing this seems like a way of controlling the pitch better, but a very ineffecient and insufficient one. Pitch perfect intonation needs very subtle muscle coordination, and if I always try to do it with pressure, I can't even start to feel the fine differences in all the muscles involved in singing, including the vocal cords (even more on it below*)

Emotionally, singing hard all the time, also makes me feel hard. And also the other way around: When I close my heart, I become hard, and so I sound hard. If you think about it, it's a very obvious and natural phenomenon. Think about how you talk when you feel very close to someone vs. how you talk when you're angry or just got insulted by a stranger. Feeling close and connected, translates into a softer voice and vice versa.

*Trying to control the pitch better by singing with more pressure is a bit like when you try to hammer a tiny nail with a sledgehammer. You need a lot of strength for holding the nail and controlling the heavy sledgehammer, because it's got way too much weight for this tiny nail. If you hit it right, you nail it. But it's really hard. Controlling how you hit the nail is much easier with a small hammer. You can focus on coordinating your muscles to hit the nail in the right angle, instead of trying to lift that heavy sledgehammer. But once you are good with coordinating the small hammer, the sledgehammer will be easier to handle as well. But then you'll do it with more trust and this will translate into ease eventually. You'll even use the sledgehammer more efficiently.

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