This a lot, that a little

One of the challenging things about building a reliable vocal technique is that some parts of your body have to let go while other parts work hard. Get it backwards, and there is trouble. Let the whole system be too loose, trouble. Flex everything too much, trouble.

Getting one part of the system to wake up and do things sometimes pulls other parts into the action excessively. Sometimes this is necessary! If you are generally underenergized in your body, making sound with big movements of breath may be called for, to wake it up energetically and get blood and gas exchange flowing. Later, breath flow may need to be dialed back, in order to get efficient vocal fold closing to happen. Still later in your development, singing may feel as simple as breathing out, and it’s tempting to say “Why didn’t I do that all along?” because we forget the tedious work that got us to our present state of advancement.

What seems like hard work early on, can seem like nothing after a lot of practice. We eventually want to get to great heaps of nothing, so that we think a singing thought and we just do singing – no trying required. Practice, repetition, revisiting fundamentals, and getting new perspectives on existing problems will get us there.