Jackson here.

I wanted to go over today the lesson and the thing that taught me how to do mixed voice.

Of course, over the course of years you're going to learn a lot of different techniques, but this specific exercise on YouTube years and years ago is how I learned how to do mixed voice.

So, check it out.

All right, so let's get into this.

This is called the cry technique.

Back when I found this, and I apologize, I was gone here for a little bit and my voice is still a little bit affected because I had a cold, it wasn't quite COVID, but it might have been.

Anyway, either way, it sucked.

So, the mixed voice thing was really elusive and very confusing when I heard about it many, many years ago, and I kept hearing all these different phrases about it, and I kept hearing all this different information about it, and it continued to just confuse and baffle me.

And then you would hear people do it, or you would hear people talk about it, and you're like, how?

I don't understand.

Like, how am I literally doing something completely physically different than this person's doing?

And it's because you probably are.

Maybe you might be somewhere in between, or maybe you're like most people where you're singing as you get higher and higher, and you get louder and louder, and then your voice flips.

And that's what I always did, and no matter what I did over the course of months and months and months, even listening to these lessons and trying them, I could not get this down.

So, first of all, if you subscribe and you like these lessons, I appreciate it.

Hit the notification bell.

I'm putting out lessons like this almost every week, along with new content and me singing and me writing and doing all kinds of stuff, so I appreciate that.

Okay, so anyway, I found this guy on YouTube a long time ago.

I don't know who it was.

It was a crappy little video of this English guy talking about the croix technique.

Today, we're going to do the croix technique, and we're going to go through a five-tone scale, and you're crying into the sound.

Now, I did this for two weeks straight, every single day, and could not do it.

And then literally the end of two weeks, and I'm not making that up to sound like you're going to get there.

That's what it took for me when I found this particular technique.

Then I started to find it.

The thing that's important to take away from this is that when I found it, it did not feel in my throat or anything like I expected at all that it would feel.

It didn't sound really like I thought it was going to sound.

What it ended up being, as I learned about it, was that I was accessing musculature that I had never used in my throat really at all, speaking, singing, making stupid voices, anything like that.

I had literally never really used these muscles ever.

That's why it was so very foreign, because I literally ...

It's kind of like, if you need more ways to interact with this in your mind, it's kind of like if you're into yoga or something like that, and you're trying to learn how to do a handstand.

You try it, and try it, and try it, and you can't, and then somebody right next to you is walking around on their hands, and you're like, how in the fuck?

Then after a certain amount of time, you find a coordination, or you find a specific muscle group, say it's right here in your core, that, oh, if I grab onto that right there, then I can sustain myself.

Then the first week, you get a little better, and then over a month, you really start to grab onto it and understand how to support yourself.

That is what this is like.

Without further ado, we're going to do it a little bit here on a five-tone scale, just like the English guy did, and then I'm going to extend this lesson for Patreon followers so that we can kind of dive into this a little bit further, but I'm trying to keep this short.

For lower voices, we're going to be down here first.

What we're doing is we're searching for a compression or a slight tension that's happening right here, and it happens when we add a cry to the sound.

If we kind of add a cry to the sound like this, you're going to feel these muscles right here start to engage, and it's going to be awesome. So, it sounds like this, mum, and we're just saying mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Now, the important thing here is also, sorry to keep talking, we're keeping the sound minimal, we're keeping the sound small.

We're not getting louder, and if you get quieter, that makes actually more sense than getting louder, but we're trying to go over our bridge and bridge ourselves back and forth between chest and head voice.

But yeah, keep making it sound, that's the important thing.

Just make the sound, and keep trying to make the sound that you hear me make.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Mum, mum, mum.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

You might have to really start to cry now. mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

Keep going.

We'll do two more.

Now obviously up there is getting into the female range or, you know, really high voices.

Either way, what we're doing there is we're trying to, what's happening is that we're compressing through our bridge.

So when our bridge wants to break apart, we're coming back in with musculature over top and we're kind of keeping that together, making it more seamless.

If you want to try another exercise really quick, one of my favorites that I'm always going to keep talking about is just using sirens.

Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, Now you hear, I don't have a bridge there.

I'm not going, and allowing myself to flip.

I'm bearing down ever so slightly by crying.

If you bring the face into it and everything, it's going to be better.

That's what's happening.

Some people say, even in opera, that basically as we're getting higher, we're crying in on pitch.

We're crying into the sound.

And one last thing I'll say about that is that you should be able to, and this is something that made it very elusive for me, is that you should be able to sing any note within your entire range loudly or quietly.

If you can't, then you're setting yourself up and you're setting your throat up in an incorrect way.

So if I want to sing right here on my bridge, I know you can't see my piano, but right here is my bridge, is a baritone.

That's a hard note for most people to sing.

I should be able to sing that without shouting or without completely quieting down.

And notice I'm not using falsetto.

I'm using full voice.

Now, if you get better at this, you can start to push into it more and push it backwards.

Yeah!

Oh!

Oh! Yeah!

Et cetera, et cetera.

Thanks for joining me.

Hope you enjoyed this quick little lesson here.

I'm going to go over to Patreon now.

If you want to join me over there, I'll continue to teach you over there.

Thank you.