The vocal break is the place in your voice where it shifts from one kind of resonance to another. It's also known as the

Passaggio and people have more than one, though there's usually one that causes a particular

amount of trouble. I think Passaggio is a very pretty name for a part of the voice that can sound awfully ugly but that's just my take

Let's ask the horns what they think The And the Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host Kirk Hamilton, and as always I'm so glad that you

join me to talk about music sung in the Prima Passaggio, music sung in the Segundo Passaggio, and

music that transcends the notion of Passaggio altogether.

It's time for the first listener Q&A of 2020 and I'm excited to get into it,

so find a comfortable place to set, turn up the volume,

and enjoy the show. I've been singing for a long time but I've only

been taking serious voice lessons for a little over a year now and man I have

learned so much it has been a fascinating journey and kind of an inward

journey at least more so than the other instruments I've learned in my life I play a lot of

different instruments but singing is the only one that exists entirely inside of me.

It makes for an interesting challenge when it comes to learning or teaching.

I don't remember who said this, but I've heard it described as basically learning how to sing is kind of like if you walked into your first violin lesson and your violin teacher just gave you some wood and some string and said okay so first thing you're going to have to do is build a violin. There's so much metaphor in teaching singing because you're

talking about things that you can't look at. You can't really look down your

throat. You know sometimes you do sing in front of a mirror so you can kind of see

what's happening in the back of your throat, but a lot of times it's just like you need to sing up and through and put it through the mask and keep your voice channeled and toward the front and toward the back. And it's all of these kind of metaphorical abstract concepts that are required to make the very fine adjustments that you need to make as you're figuring out how to sing.

It's just a very different process than learning drums or guitar or something where a teacher can just look at your fingers and say no, no, like move your finger here, you know, put your finger here, adjust your wrist like so.

With singing, they can't just reach inside your throat and kind of be like no

no no no move your tongue and put it like this this will make the notes sound

good sometimes I wish it were that simple even while I understand that singing

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