Matilda Lindell Voice Studio

How often have you heard that belting can hurt your voice? It’s not the best rep for this beautiful, emotional voice quality and doesn’t necessarily put our minds where it needs to be. I’m not sure why this lie is out there, just because belting is a powerful, often louder, sound. If you yell all day long, yes, that would be tiring for your voice. But that is not belting, that is just yelling for a long time..

Like any voice quality, you want healthy technique and when you do belting right - it can have a rehabilitating effect on your voice! I’ll dive more into that another time.

There are many parts to consider for a sustainable, healthy belting technique. That’s why I created my course “Breaking Down The Belt”, to give singers all the tools and strategies they need to create their dream belt without just aiming for a louder, fuller sound and fall into bad habits of pushing air, closing the throat or running out of range. 

Here are...

Touring can mean long shows and wear on your voice, extensive, tiring travel, and very little sleep. To last on tour and to set yourself up for all the different sounds you want to use on stage - I’m going to share three of my favorite tricks to use! This is of course valuable even for just one off shows, before or on auditions, with your students, and so on!

Number 1) Using slack folds to get a little rest and reset in your voice or set myself up for a more talky quality. If you’ve been around my block for a while, you know I LOVE slack folds for so many things! As the name reveals, your vocal folds are “slack” and relaxed and are just producing an irregular cycle with a bubbling, frying sound. In Estill Voice Training we call it slack folds but it’s also called vocal fry and glottal fry. 

When we produce this sound, our voice parts often want to go to their neutral or mid position so it’s effective if you want to go back to your homebase so...

Thankfully, we all have different voices. It would be boring if we didn't! We are all unique. BUT we don't have to limit ourselves. I've heard so many times that "This is just what my voice sounds like" - as in, I am not capable to sing in any other way. If you want to - you can! You have to be brave to try things, go outside of your comfort zone and put a lot of practice in, but we have so many sounds inside of us. 

When one of my students who took my course "Breaking Down The Belt" asked how different singers would go about using all the tools from the course, my simple answer was that we all have the same parts so how we would use these tools depends on what we want to sound like and you need to practice more on the techniques that don't come natural to you.

You are just used to singing in a certain way, that's your attractor state, your base line. It's a place of stability in your voice where you will most probably always go until you challenge yourself...

Sometimes we are eager to work on those high, more difficult parts of a song and we forget to start with the foundation. Do you recognize this?  Well what can I tell you… In contemporary styles when you might want a belt quality, it’s definitely important to not forget about the steps leading you up to those high notes!

I know, it’s a bit boring and it might feel unnecessary to work on something that sounds just fine when you really want to hit those powerful belt notes already! :) In my course ”Breaking Down The Belt” I go on and on about what I call ”The Big Belt Foundation”. The first part of it is about finding your thickest thick folds without any sweetness, to first get used to actually using your vocal folds without unwanted tension and get use to ”feeling” your voice. It often seems like singers think they should never feel their throat or voice but it depends on what sound you are making. We should feel it,...