[0:00]Having an attractive, confident sounding voice is attainable for everyone. And today, I'm going to teach you how, using what I've learned as an opera singer and YouTuber. So let's get started. Let's start off with some of the things you can physically do to enhance the quality of your voice and make the most of the voice that naturally comes out of your mouth. So all of us have a natural speaking voice. It comes with a natural tone, intonation, and timber that's just kind of what you're born with. And that's largely dictated by the structure of your face. You should think of your body and your face as a musical instrument, and the larger or smaller that it is, and the more space it has in different areas, the different sounding your voice will be. Is that my voice? Is that my voice? But there are definitely things you can do to make it work for you and kind of manipulate it a little bit so that it has that beautiful honey quality that so many of us love in a great speaking voice. In order to do this, it's important to understand where we naturally speak and how so many of us tend to manipulate our voices artificially. And then how you can do it so that it sounds organic. So when we speak, most of us speak a little bit higher or lower than our natural register. And in my experience, it's better if you speak right in the middle of it. So rather than having your voice come through your forehead or your nose, You know that mustard really clears up the nasal passage. Or your voice come through your throat. I got a lot of problems with your people. You want it to come from your mouth, quite literally. And in singing, we call that the mask, and that is the most pleasurable and easy place to place your voice so that it sounds really good. The first exercise that's perfect for placing your voice exactly in the mask or the center of your face, and my own personal favorite exercise for doing this, is lip trills. Now, this sounds ridiculous, feels ridiculous, and you look ridiculous when you do it, but it works really, really well. So try to get all of that out of your mind and just really lean into it, and I think you'll be really happy with the results. So in order to do a lip trill, all you need to do is take a really big deep breath in, and then when you exhale, you're going to blow through your closed lips, kind of like you're doing a raspberry.
[2:14]And you can hear just from my own example just now, my voice already sounds like it's in a better place just from when I started the video. It's incredibly effective and again, one of my personal favorites. As you were doing your lip trills, you probably ran into a little bit of difficulty in maintaining it, and that comes down to lack of oxygen. Maybe it felt like your air was kind of running out, and that's because many of us when we think lip trill, or we think anything that requires a lot of air, we almost want to sustain too short. So we want to punch our air out. If you think of your lungs and your body as an accordion, we think big breath in and then quick exhale. And that's actually not what you want. In order to maintain a lip trill and in order to make your voice sound really nice when you're speaking or singing, you want to make sure that it's riding gracefully on all of the air supply that you have. So again, using the accordion analogy, you want to bring as much air as possible into your lungs and then slowly let it out. If you get rid of it too quickly, not only will you not be able to do a lip trill and your voice won't be put in the right spot, but that naturally makes people very nervous when you're talking to them, because when someone sounds like they're running out of oxygen, it's our natural biological inclination to get scared. So here's a good example. I'm going to do one version running out of oxygen, and then one not running out of oxygen. Let's start with running out of oxygen. So I'm going to talk really quickly and all of a sudden it feels like I'm running out of air and now I'm going to get really, really nervous and you can feel that I'm getting really stressed and I'm really tense and now I'm just kind of struggling to breathe because I'm literally running out of oxygen in my lungs. versus this, where I'm speaking slowly and really using all of the air in my system, and when I feel like I'm running out, I take a break, take a breath in, and then continue speaking. Using that accordion analogy again, you can also use that as a way to encourage the flow of your words in a very pleasurable way. So in singing, we are taught to never punch our words, because that creates a very aggressive sound, and it's also counterproductive to airflow and allowing your voice to really work for you rather than against you. So I apply that same logic when speaking. Now, there are definitely moments when you want to emphasize a word and you do kind of punctuate that word a bit. But generally speaking, and certainly at the beginning of a sentence, you want a word to flow off your breath, and not stop your breath. So a good example of that would be, I wouldn't say avocado. I would say avocado. So as I'm breathing out, I kind of throw the avocado on the air rather than using it as a way to stop my air flow. Another thing you can do to ensure that your voice sounds as attractive as possible and you're really enhancing the quality of your natural voice, is to eliminate any of that gutteral sound that comes from phlegm and all of that nastiness that gathers in the back of your throat. It's what so many of us experience around allergy season, certainly if we've ever been sick, and then when you first wake up in the morning, you end up with a kind of low, raspy, almost kind of sounding voice like this, and that is never what you want for your voice to sound really good. So to prevent that, you can quite literally clear your throat, do what we've all done, one of those, and it's very effective. You just want to make sure that you're never doing that aggressively. And that's because your vocal cords are super delicate. I remember when I first started taking voice lessons when I was about 10, I got a really strong lecture day one on how to treat my vocal cords with care, because essentially, they are two muscles that butt up against each other like this. And when they're functioning properly, they ever so slightly tap. They never hit each other. But when you cough, or you clear your voice very aggressively, or you yell and scream, they smack together. And that repeated smacking causes calluses to build up, which causes permanent damage, and it can't be undone, and it destroys the sound and quality of your voice forever.
[6:31]Oh, I don't think I have the strength. Now, my personal favorite way to clear my throat from any of that nastiness is to just drink water. Staying hydrated is so important for not only your entire bodily functions and everything to work the way that it should, but also for the quality and sound of your voice, because lack of hydration causes our bodies to retain water. So your fingers will get nice and swollen, your feet will feel swollen, and you just feel kind of bloated, and that definitely translates into your vocal cords as well. And when your vocal cords get swollen and dehydrated, it makes your voice sound really strained, which is not a pleasant sound, and it's something that's totally preventable. That's why you'll always see singers drinking water religiously and constantly staying hydrated. That's for very good reason, because hydration automatically makes your voice sound better. Now let's talk about the ideal volume to speak at in order to make your voice sound as attractive and appealing as possible, and that is going to be slightly below your natural speaking volume. Many of us have a natural volume that's dictated by who we're talking to, the situation we're in, and then how shy we are naturally or how confident we are. And so that can range from yelling all the way down to whispering. And all of those have a place, but if you're speaking in a way that you want to be engaging and you want to be friendly and you want to be very comfortable for someone to listen to, you want to speak slightly below your natural volume. Similarly, you also want the pace of your voice to be slightly slower than normal. So this is something I have really worked on in my YouTube career, because when I first started, I would speak with my natural speaking voice, and that is naturally very, very quick. So I had to really make a conscious effort to slow it down, and it makes your voice sound a lot better because it allows all of the things you're going to practice that we've gone through already to really work for you. So rather than trying to get your words out in a very hurried way because you might forget something, it allows you a moment to be very deliberate about what you're saying, and then of course, allow your voice to flow very freely and very elegantly, which is always, always nice. And last but not least is to always have good posture. Good posture is essential to ensuring that your voice sounds as good as it possibly can, because you never want to restrict air flow. And restricting air flow is automatically achieved by having bad posture. When you hunch over like this, the air has to work really hard to exit your body, and then your voice naturally sounds a little bit more restricted because you're creating unpleasant tension throughout your body. So always make sure that you're sitting upright or standing upright, and it will allow your voice to flow very freely and always sound its absolute best. So those are my tips for having an attractive, confident sounding voice. They're things that I've learned as a classically trained opera singer and things that I've learned through trial and error here on YouTube, and by making videos for all of you. So I hope that these tips were helpful and they gave you some things you can incorporate into your vocal routines in order to really enhance the voice you have and make it sound its absolute best. And like always, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in my next one. Have a great day.
