How to Stop Singing Breathy: Vocal Clarity, Cord Closure & Efficient Air Use Explained

In this episode, Sarah answers one of the most common questions singers ask: how do I stop singing breathy? She breaks down why breathiness happens, the role of vocal fold resistance and cord closure, and why “more air” is often the wrong solution. You’ll learn when breathy singing is a stylistic choice versus a technical limitation, plus practical tools to build clarity, efficiency, and vocal stamina. This episode connects breath support, resistance, and tone in a way that finally makes sense.

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Transcript

0:03

If you are tired of not making progress and you're ready to be the artist, you know you're meant to be, you are in the right place. You are listening to the Singers Path podcast. The Path or performing artist training hub will cover everything including singing tips that actually work, advice from top industry professionals and life-changing mindset shifts out with the Starving artist and in with the Thriving Artist. I'm your host, Sarah Bishop, professional singer. Actor, educator and entrepreneur. I'm not afraid to speak the truth and stop the gatekeeping of quality information so you can actually become the artist you dream of being. So let's get on the path, shall we? Even though we're all on our own journeys, it always helps to have a guide. Hello. Hello. Welcome to the Singers Path podcast. It's me, your host, Sarah Bishop. And here I am today on my marathon of recording. Okay. And we are doing this special four part series where we are answering the. The most asked questions that singers have. Right? Last episode, we talked about the ever elusive breath support singing from your diaphragm. What is breath support? How do I get that? And today we are going to answer a question I know you're dying to get an answer to, and that is, how do I stop singing? So breathy. This does have to do with the breath support. So if you haven't listened to that episode, you can go back there and give that a, a good old listen and a like and a follow and maybe a share or two. Um, just so that you are ready and prime to receive the information on this. Um, but we are going to give you actual actionable steps to get rid of the breathiness and how to get clarity and why that's important. This is gonna be really action packed. Again, I really appreciate you guys sharing. If you wanna give us a five star review, written review, take a screenshot of this review. If you really like what we're putting down, and email it to us at singers path@gmail.com, we will enter you to win a. Free lesson. We do a drawing, um, from the pool of people who leave us testimonials and reviews. And as a thank you, um, we do a little event, a little giveaway, giveaway, um, as a thank you. Okay. So, um, and one more thing before I dive in, a reminder, if you like anything that I'm putting down, you want more information. I was telling, I was talking about in the last episode how singing can so much be about the rule of opposites, right? The rule of identifying what your voice needs. Learning how to address those needs. That antidote to the habit, right? Giving, like learning where it's off and learning what to do to get it on. Okay. And, um, rule of opposites. If it's doing this thing, do something else. Like do the opposite. Okay. We're gonna talk about that specifically here. If we're singing breathy, what do we do to stop singing Breathy. And I'm gonna probably mention this again, but since I'm on the live, we have people visiting, um, make sure that you check out the Discover Mini course. It's a, uh, a lower priced thing that I offer. I do tend to have things that are, um, they're pretty in depth. Uh, so a lot of my products that I make aren't like, they're not like cheap, right? So, um, this is one that I really did. Try my best to keep it a really affordable price for how valuable it is. Basically, the Discover mini course has been viewed on seven continents. People, well, not seven, six,'cause Antarctica, all the continents, it's Antarctica. Um, but people, singers all over the world love it, basically teaches you how to be your own voice teacher. And I know that sounds wild. Like, why are you teaching me how to do your job well? Because I believe you should understand how to, the functionality of your instrument is, I feel like you shouldn't be so codependent on voice teachers. Like I feel like you should be able to help yourself somewhat. I don't think voice teachers are replaceable because you don't have the hours of expertise and training, right? You nothing can ever replace a teacher. You need to be able to have your own back. Dude, you need to understand what you need. So if you like anything that I'm doing and you're, you got the itch and the bug, go watch, go get, go to the link in my bio, in the show notes, get the Discover mini course. Um, my gift to you, I, I super duper love to assist people with that information and I think a lot of this will make a lot more sense. Obviously, this won't apply on the podcast, so I'm sorry if you're listening to this late, if there are spots you will see them. Listed down below, but registration at the time that I'm recording this for, our group lessons are live. That's the only way to work with me at this point. So, again, if you like what I'm putting down, you really wanna go deeper. You're like ready to fucking solve these vocal issues and like stop singing breathy permanently. Okay. And, um, you, yeah, you just like how I teach, you know that you're gonna click well, um, go in on the live, it's in my link bio. Go to the group lessons. Um, just know there is a prereq for pillars. That's to ensure that we get to song work. We're really just working on shit that really matters when you're up there. We are like giving you customized, like actionable steps that are gonna get you the fastest results. And we focus on songs, right? So I'm not like re lecturing what I'm talking about here. So that's why you have to have the Pillar series to be able to join, so we're all on the same page. It's fair to everybody and everybody excels at an astronomical level. Group lessons, I'll, I'll say this one more thing. I know sometimes people are like, oh, I don't know if I can grow as much in group lessons. I'll just pay for private lessons. That's fine. Choose your own adventure. However, I, I understand. I used to feel that way too, like how is that possible? But actually I have seen so much faster growth. In group lesson containers in individuals, even individuals that I have taught for a long time, there was something that accelerated their growth when they were being witnessed by a supportive team, and when they were finally seeing themselves reflected in other people and training their ears and finally being like, oh. That's what it is. There's something deeply unique and exceptional and special about group containers, and especially this one where you still get that individual one-on-one time like with me, and you're benefiting from others, and you get the support. And guys, it's audition season right now. Like you have something pop up, you get a, you get a coach. There's many, many reasons to love group lessons and that's why there's only a few spots left. Most of the students stay and if they don't, it's just 'cause they have a scheduling conflict. So if that sounds like something you'd be down to clown with, um, check out the link in bio. It is an investment, so if it feels like a lot, just know there's payment plans available. Um. If you're like, Hey, I really can't do it this time, then make sure you're checking out pillars so you're ready to go for next time. Okay. Can't guarantee when that's gonna be. Can't tell the future. So if you're really filling the pool in the bug, make sure you get your ass in class. That's my very professional catchphrase for group. Group lessons. Get your ass in class. It's my favorite thing to teach. I really do. Genuinely hope you're there, 'cause I would love to connect with you. Okay, let's get to this dire question. Everyone wants to know, how do I stop singing breathy? Oh my God. Okay, so here's the thing about breathy singing. Okay, we gotta, we gotta put this outta the way. I'm not gonna gaslight you and just think, because I, there's a lot of like general broad statements that are like, breathy, singing's bad. No, you are not dumb. You can hear songs with your ears. You know, there's artists that use breath on their sound. It can't be that bad. Many artists make millions of dollars having a breathy sound. Okay. But this will tie into our last episode about breath usage. Okay. Just because people are putting breath on, on purpose as a vocal color, because it sounds sexy as fuck on a mic, does not mean it feels great or as a sustainable, efficient use of sound. Okay? Or efficient use of the instrument. So when you sing super breathy, it just is a choice. That's what we would like it to be. I'm not gonna tell you to never sing breathy because that's unreasonable, and in fact, it could actually be a really cool color that you could choose to add texture to your expression of your song. Okay? So breathy singing can be really pretty. I mean, I think we've seen it with Ariana Grande playing Belinda. She has a breathy sound sometimes. Right. We're gonna talk about, um, another thing with tone quality here and another part of this Four parts special series answering your most dire questions. But you know, Ariana Grande has like a bright high laryngeal breathy sound. She's doing that on purpose. She's a really good technician. Right. She has a little bit of jaw tension, but I know people get mad at me. She does that, but so the fuck do I, everybody fucking does. Okay. Um, she's an excellent singer. Okay. She's brilliant and she's choosing 'cause she does a lot of vocal production. She's recording artist, so she does a lot of like vocal style stuff and she's such good control of her instruments and credible that she is able to. Add Breathiness and then take it out. And so when we're talking about like, how do I stop singing breathy, it's not that we can never sing breathy on purpose. It's that if Breathiness is our only, only go-to. Like we only sound breathy. Okay. That's what we're gonna talk about today. This all ties into again, the last episode about breath support and what is breath support. I think a lot of the time people equate breath support with actually this real. Peace that is causing the breathy sound, which is resistance. So someone will hear a breathy sound. I don't know why the song's in my head Tonight will be the night. I'm gonna pick a different song. That's a stupid fucking song. Um, when she loved me, they'll hear that sound and they'll go, it's unsupported. Okay. And then you'll go, what the fuck does that mean? And the last episode was when we debunked that, but really it comes down to cord closure and resistance. So again, to summarize what I said last time, this piece, this resistance piece is the answer for you to stop sounding breath. You sound breathy because you're fucking funneling a shit ton of air through your vocal folds and your air, your, your folds aren't. Aren't regulating. They are, they're not resisting it. Basically, your muscles are not coming together in the way they're supposed to, to cause your sound to be ringy. Here's some reasons why you have to learn to get more efficient cord closure. Okay, you ready? You can get a clear ringy to tone or overtones without it. It's impossible. It's also impossible to belt healthily and mixed belt. Okay? So you're telling me, you guys come to me all the time. You, you're telling me you wanna do all this stuff, you wanna sound powerful and you wanna sound clean, but you want it to feel easy and you wanna do mixed belt, but then you're not addressing this and that's why you're unable to do this because this is a, this is a pivotal foundational. Function that is required for this sound to get any kind of ringness. Okay? It's also helps, like a lot of you are trying to sing soprano, like you're trying to sing galinda, right? Um, for you, and it sounds so airy because your vocal folds aren't coming together. Now, here's something I'm gonna talk about with resistance. We're. Go deep for here in a second. This is a little bit more advanced. If you are breathy and you just sound like this all the time, you just need like basic cord closure. Okay? But even, even the amount of resistance or the fullness of the, like the depth of the fold and how much of the fold comes together will vary between styles. And if you're an advanced singer and you want to genuinely like stylistically sound. Accurate singing more operatic or legit styles versus singing like rock or pop or musical theater. Then we covered this, this intricate in depth exploration of resistance in the course advanced mix. That's my level three course, and that really flip flops between, it, flip flops between like. Like adjusting in microscopic ways, cord closure so that it sounds appropriate and it has to do, like all of it has to be done with, like all of these sounds have to have even resistance. But then like for example, head Voice has less depth of the vocal fold coming together versus. A chest dominant mix, right? Or a mixed belt, like Paramore has more of the vocal fold coming together in depth, like the thickness of the fold. There's more of it versus head voice, right? There's still even closure, like the full fold is still coming together, but there's less of it versus mixed belt where the like more of the full fold is coming together. Okay? Again, that's really extreme. If you can't get a non-air breath to begin with, don't fucking worry about it right now. Okay, we're gonna give you some exercises just to get you to do it. Okay. Um, and this is like actually one of the main things that causes a lot of vocal fatigue in people is actually lack of resistance. You would think that if you're talking a lot or you're singing a lot, you would wanna like whisper and back off. That's actually more fatiguing because again, it's not efficient use of your instrument. You get more sound, more overtones, more ring, more cut when you have your. Your vocal votes coming together efficiently. Okay? You have better resistance, and this is, again, I'm gonna say it a third time, this is how you stop sounding so fucking breathy. And again, I'm gonna say this one more time. If you want more in depth help with this, we cover this in the Discover Mini course. Please go to the link in my bio or swipe up in the show notes on the podcast. I digress. Offer, offer, offer. But listen, I'm a business bitch and I'm also, I also wanna genuinely help you. There's only so much I could do, giving you a couple tips on a podcast. If you wanna fucking work on it, you gotta go do the fucking course. You know what I mean? Okay. So let's give you a couple tips, at least to get you to stop singing. Breathy. Write the fuck now, so you know what the fuck I'm talking about. Okay, so the first one, the most extreme one, okay. Is actually using a creek. What the fuck is a creek, Sarah? Well, sorry, I'm picking up my cat. Well, a creek is like a glottal stop. Okay. Now there's a difference between creaking and like glottal fry. Glottal fry is like little air bubbles popping through your vocal folds. Uh, okay. Versus a creak as you're pitching. And you just have like a lot of depth in the vocal fold when you do a creak properly. I'm gonna do it here in a second. It doesn't have to be loud. It just has to be, it's, it's kind of small. It just has to be like kind of edgy with that kind of, uh, uh, sound to it. You can also use, I remember when I first learned to do this, I was like, well, wasn't isn't this bad for you to do the glottal stops? No, it's actually when I said, remember when I said singing is the rule of opposites? If you're an aass singer. This would be the opposite tool. This would be the tool that addresses it. This would be actually medicine for you when you're so off balance to bring you back on balance. What's the thing you're doing? Do the opposite. You sound airy. Do some glottal stops. What's a glottal stop, Sarah. Well, we use some in speech all the time and like some, again, people that are untrained or don't fucking understand it. We'll say, well, glottal stops are bad for you. Don't glo Last, last glottal. We use glottal and speech all the fucking time. Anything that starts with a vowel is a glottal apple, egg, ice, easy, it easy. Those are all glottals. They use this in speech language therapy to help people who have sounds like this or have vocal injuries, right? You don't need to do it an extreme way. We don't need to beat the shit out of it, make it quiet, but you still need to get this cord closure or this resistance cord closure resistance. Those are synonymous. So the same word, depth of the vocal fold. When I say that is the amount of thickness of the fold that's coming together like. Not just getting closure. Like the fold isn't just touching, it's like fully touching at the mo. Most of the tissue is coming together, right? It's more of like a 3D model of it. Okay. Versus like seeing it from over the top and you're getting you, you're getting less of a view. More depth is gonna be more fullness of the tissue. Okay. Anyway, so here's how you do the creek. Okay. So Creek, there's a couple ways to do it. You can pretend you're like an elderly person in a rocking chair. Mm mm. That edge. Doing it on an M or an N is gonna help you in a really teeny little way, train your vocal folds to come the fuck together. Okay? That's the most basic way you can practice then, and this is what a lot of y'all have trouble with. You're like, well, I get it in the bottom and I can't do it in the top. Okay, so then you're gonna start to stretch through your voice during the creak. So you're starting to train to isolate the different function. So when you're going up and down in your voice, right, when you're lower in your voice, your vocal folds are thicker, okay? When you're higher, your voice, your vocal folds are thinner. As you go from the low point to the high point in your voice, your vocal folds gradually thin out. They get skinnier. Okay? So what you need to functionally train is how to get your vocal folds to go from thick to thin. To get them to have good resistance. So if you were to do this, this tool, and then as you got higher, it got airy again, like that, or you see how like as it gets higher, it just goes, ah, like that, that's again, your voice needs to be trained so that you can stretch and get thin into head voice and hold cord closure. Mm. Okay, so that's the first function that you would isolate to get that to happen. Another thing, I actually just today when I recorded this, I re, I released and I was like, oh, five things that will guarantee to help your chest voice it. The other thing you could do to actually help get like less of an airy sound, like how to stop sounding airy. You can sing your phrase on the creek. So like what I did like right now with the creek, you could do, if we're doing, no one wants the wicked, the Glenda cut. You could practice it on that to, to start to get the closure going. Okay. Um, I'll do that. So Creek is kind of extreme. I'll give you one other kind of extreme one. You can also, I did this in the SOVT lesson a couple, like a week ago. This is also super, super valuable. If you take your fist, like as if you're, you have, I don't know, you're just making a fist and you put it up against your mouth and you just sing straight into it. Woo. Right. That's an example of Vanessa vt, but it's gonna make you get cord closure. So again, it's gonna sound like you're fucking suffocating, but that's, but that's what you are just blocking any air from coming out of your mouth and it's creating so much pressure that it makes your vocal folds come together with pressure balance. And then if you were to sing the phrase the truth, you'll get a clearer sound. No, I can't fully sing this 'cause it's one in the morning and my husband's, it's actually almost two in the morning and my husband's sleeping. So, oh, my cat is moving my camera. Okay, so fist, we got a creaky Magee creak. I guess we'll give you maybe one more. So again, this kind of goes back to the SOVT. You can always go back and listen to the SOVT exercise. This will also all help you. Not sing breathy. If you listen to that and you'd listen to the part where you're singing into like a really small diameter straw, so using like, I wanna use such a small coffee straw, I'd maybe use like a juice box straw and pretend like you're playing the kazoo. That will also help with this issue. And the final thing I will say is you can also use a v. Hmm. Using any V consonant that is like a vocalized consonant, which means you have to pitch to make the consonant monkey no velociraptor. Okay? When you're pitching on the consonant, that is a voiced consonant, so any voice consonant is going to help your voice. Do instead of going, no, now you can't do it. Veloc, velociraptor, okay. But if you went Velociraptor and then you tried to actually speak, um, that those are also more gentle ways to get better resistance, better cord closure. The final thing I'll say, and this is probably the quickest fix for all of you, how to stop singing Bethy. A lot of you have, uh, what my friend Emily Morris calls a singer accent. A lot of you, the step one actually is just to stop fucking quote unquote, singing things like a lot of you have a weird relationship with your speaking voice. You think it's loud or ugly, but your singing voice stems from your speaking voice. So a lot of you sound breathy because you have like a total different identity of what you think singing is, but you talk normal. So then it's about re reassessing what your singing voice is, and if you can make it closer to talking. Okay. Um, I just got a comment on TikTok choir singing experience makes this so hard. Oh my god. Yes it does. Hi, Elsa in Australia. It's so late right now. Um, one of my students just joined. Um, yeah. Choir singing, like choir singing, kind of like microphone singing. It blends well to ad hi. Adding air really helps to blend the sound. So if you have an eerie sound in a choir. And you're getting tired. Maybe make, get, get a clearer tone, but that also might make you pop out and not blend because it's gonna give you overtones, which is gonna make the sound cut. Right. Do you see what I was kind of saying? And from before? So blending, you're gonna actually wanna add breath. I mean, it depends on your choir. It depends on who you, where you're singing. I don't think a lot of people want you to do that, but some, some styles will, okay? But if you're, if you're, if you find you're overly singing breathy a lot, this is it. You gotta add more cord closure. Gotta train with resistance. Okay. Smaller straws, v fist, uh, small straw creek. I gave you like fucking five or six tools, no one's. And then just talk. Those are all, I'll give you like a bajillion examples of ways to stop singing breathy. Okay? So if these work and you love what I'm putting down, you like it. Remember, you can deepen this work. Help yourself even more by getting the Discover mini course. You can go ahead and share this podcast episode, like it subscribe. Um, this helps us get it out to more people. Um, again, I mentioned this before. If you leave us a written five star review and not even just on the podcast, on any of our products, we enter each of those are a separate entry to get entered to win a free lesson. And actually someone on the live right now want a free lesson. So, hey, Elsa. Um, so that's possible. It could be in your future, you could win the drawing. Someone's right here that did it. Right. Get a free listen. So yeah, and every entry, every testimonial or review you leave. You get another entry, okay? And everybody can get a free entry if you just review the podcast, which is free. I really hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. If you love this, please give it a. Like follow. Unfortunately, if you're listening to the podcast group lesson, registration is most likely closed. Join the wait list if that's the case, or get the prereq pillars if you're watching the live. Make sure if you really love what I'm putting down, get your butt in the group lessons. I hope to see you in class and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five star written review on Apple Podcasts. This helps me get this information out to more artists all over the world. Let's work together to spread the joys of music. Until next time, I'm your host, Sarah Bishop, signing off from the Singers Path podcast. Thanks for listening.