Struggling with a vocal break? It might not just be your voice—tension in your body, voice, and mindset could be getting in the way.
In this first episode of my Erase Your Break podcast mini-series, we’re taking a holistic approach to unlocking your voice by addressing the physical and mental tension that often holds singers back. I’m sharing one powerful tension-release tip for each area—so you can start singing with more freedom, better coordination, and less vocal strain.
Whether you’re building a smoother mix voice or just want to sing without limitations, this episode lays the foundation for a stronger, more confident sound.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
00:00 – Intro: Why Tension Might Be the Real Issue
01:46 – Vocal Tension Release
04:15 – Body Tension and Singing
06:50 – Mindset Tension and Vocal Freedom
09:40 – Recap + What’s Coming in Part 2
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Hello singers and welcome to Vocal Tips in 10. I'm Amber Mogg Cathey and today I want to talk about what I feel is one of the absolute most important parts for erasing your vocal breaks, creating your best mix voice, creating just your best, most confident, consistent voice period, which if you sing any contemporary styles of music, mix voice is a big piece of that. And I feel like not only is this one of the most important things, but it's overlooked so often. And kind of what I call it is how to get out of your own way.
And what I mean by that is blocks that we have, tension that we have, areas that we are gripping where we need to release, just things that are keeping us from being able to access all that we are able to do and therefore making erasing our break, singing in our mix, creating our most professional sound more and more difficult.
I have a course called Erase Your Break, which is all about my Erase Your Break method, and the first module is called How to Get Out of Your Own Way, because I feel like it's such an important part that we skip a lot. So many singers just come in wanting to do mix voice exercises, and then they wonder why they aren't as successful as they would like to be, and as they feel they should
And when I look at how to get out of your own way and what I want to talk about today is how to get out of your own way vocally. So I'm really talking about tension blocks that we have at the vocal fold level in the body and in the mind because our body is our instrument. Our mind tells our body what to do. I wish we could separate it y'all. We cannot.
It's all part of it. So what I want to do today is I want to share a tip for you to help you get out of your own way in each of those areas. And we're going to start with the voice, how to release tension at the vocal fold level. And obviously there are so many tools and tips and techniques that I could give you. If you are interested in more of this, you should check out my Erase Your Break course. You can join the wait list. I'll put that link down in the show notes or vocal pro members are able to access it always. So if you want more of that, definitely check that out.
But this is a tip and a tool that you can start to play with in your voice, that is semi-occluded vocal tract exercises. Semi-occluded vocal tract is a super fancy-pants way of saying your mouth is partially closed. Your vocal tract is a tube that starts above your vocal folds, it ends at your mouth. How you shape your mouth can really dramatically determine how your sound comes out, right? How it sounds, how it feels for you.
vocal tract means your mouth is partially closed somehow. And the one that I want to give you today for really looking at tension at the vocal fold level is singing through a straw into water.
So I've got my water and my straw here. You always want to use, if you're going into water, drinking size or larger. I generally lean towards a little bit of the bigger kind of boba tea smoothie size straws. what I want you to do is put that straw into the water. First, I want you to think about it as an extension of your vocal tract. So I see a lot of singers who sing through the straw and they just kind of clamp down on it really tight and then try to, you know, blow sound through and
It's not as effective for them. What I want you to think about now is instead of the end of the vocal tract being your mouth, the straw is an extension of the vocal tract. So it's one open tube until the straw hits the water.
I generally like to put my straw in the water to start out a half inch to an inch maximum. What you want to play with is that you can feel some resistance, but I feel like a good cue is you can feel some nice buzz around your lips. Just the airflow and the resonance of the sound on the lips to the straw. I feel like when you can feel that nice, buzzy resonance, you know you're in a pretty good spot. So you're going to think an vowel.
but you're going to wrap your lips around the straw, put it in about a half inch to an inch, you're going to do what feels good for you and sing.
Hopefully you can hear that. You can hear all those nice bubbles. Here's what singing through a straw into water does for you. Because it's a semi-occluded vocal tract exercise, it helps release tension at the vocal folds, sets them up efficiently. It's great for resonance because you can feel that buzz at your lips. It's great for breath management because you can see those nice bubbles. It helps give you a really good visual of are you overdoing it? Are you underdoing it as far as breath? But what the straw in water does that nothing else does is it genuinely
massages your vocal fold tissue and your laryngeal tissue. As you have that change in water pressure, you get this nice change in air pressure at the vocal folds and it gives it this massage
So I love this one.
Now I want to give you a tip for tension in the body. And remember our body is our instrument.
We all have these habits, these patterns where we have a tendency to grip and squeeze. Everybody's a little bit different, but I feel like a lot of us neck and shoulders is a big thing because we spend so much time looking down at our phones, down at a computer, for musicians, down at a piano, down at a guitar, whatever that is, a lot of time looking down. So we can build up a lot of tension there. So an exercise I really
like to help release some of that tension and bring awareness to that is you're going to take your hands, you're going to put them on your collarbone. I like to cross my hands over in a little X so my right hand is on my left collarbone, my left hand is on my right collarbone. I'm going to put just a little bit of pressure there and gently tug down on that skin and then I'm going to tip my head backwards.
you guys, is tight, tight for me today. And you can feel it stretches this whole front part of your neck. I feel it kind of down my chest. It can really help get the root of your tongue. There's this muscle called the platysma muscle. It kind of goes from your chin all the way down to your collarbone.
so this is a great exercise for just checking in to see how do you feel there you might be a lot tighter than you realize and then to help get you a little stretch there
And again, there's so many more tools than this, but this is just one that you can start to play with.
my hope really is it just brings awareness to the fact that we all have patterns and habits and things we're doing. Maybe it's technically, maybe it's tension that we carry in the body and then mindset, just the way we think about things So it's just taking the time to bring awareness around these and think about where am I getting in my own way? And then building tools to help you get out of your own way. So in the Erase Your Break course for the mindset piece, there are
Downloadable PDFs every single week that give you journal prompts. I find journaling can be so Helpful even people who are like, you know, I don't really do that If you just start kind of free writing sometimes things come out and you realize that you're thinking things that maybe you didn't even want to realize you were thinking just kind of again patterns Scripts and stories that we tell ourselves that who knows how long we've been telling ourselves those things. So in the erasure brick course you get writing prompts for that and you get PDFs
for goal setting and just checking in all the time, voice, body, and mind to make sure that as you're working through the different techniques and building your vocal tool belt, erasing your vocal break, creating your best mix, your most consistent, connected sound
that you're getting out of your own way as much as possible during all of that. So mindset, journaling, all those things can be really helpful. But the tool I want to give you today, what I find can be so helpful for singers, and it's helpful for so many other things, it can also tie into getting rid of tension in the body, it can help with vocal function. But let's talk about it just in terms of mindset today, is movement. If you are a person who every time you go for that higher note with more power, you immediately think, even if it is subconscious,
right before it, here we go. This is almost always where I break. This is the part, these are so hard for me. Your whole body, just immediately tightens to protect you. It doesn't know the difference between you getting ready to hit a note that you don't feel totally confident about and, you know, a wild animal coming to attack you. It just goes into like fight mode, like let's protect them at all costs.
So a tool I find that can help you really override that and kind of get the mind and body on the same page is movement. One of my favorite things to do, if you've listened to me at all, watched anything I've done at all, if you've ever worked with me, you know that moving your hand in a straight line in front of you as you are singing, whether you're going for a really high note, whether you're going for a really low note,
is one of my favorite things and it does so many things but I'm just going to focus today on how it can help you get out of your head. If you have a tendency to think let me get up there my gosh here it comes this is going to be horrible and you're moving your hand in a straight line in front of you your brain can't think straight line in front of you and up and down it's going to go with the body it takes that up and down away so some of that kind of gripping and tensing that your body's been doing doesn't happen it feels better you have more success and then it's a cycle right because the better we
feel the more success we have, the less we freak out about it. So I find movement period, but the straight line in front of you, I need t-shirts made, I need body tattoos. It's such a powerful tool. And again, it's one of those tools that can help you with vocal function, it can help you with body, and it can help you with mind. I really feel
building awareness of the habits that we have, of the patterns that we have, of the things we're telling ourselves as we're doing this high level work, as we're doing work period as singers, but especially the biggest thing I get asked about all the time is better mix voice, erasing my vocal breaks, having a more consistent sound, a more connected sound, being able to sound how I want when I sing the songs I want to sing. And when we have awareness over these habits and patterns that we have, and then we can find out what might be getting in our own way,
and then building purposeful tools for those, I just think can be a real game changer. If you want more movements, 25 movements to help you get out of your own way, I have a free movement training right now where I break down 25 different movements for all areas of the voice, better high notes, better low notes, better mix, better warmups, better cool downs, better agility You can get it for free. I'm going to put the link in the show notes. I think it's pretty fantastic.
Check out the Erase Your Break course. in the show notes as well. And like I said, if you want to try two weeks the Vocal Pro membership for free, you can check out the Erase Your Break course anytime you want. Thank you guys for listening. I hope this was helpful and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
