Episode 24 — Vocal Coaching, Twanging and Matters of Life and Death
Summary: Recorded live at the ALSO Festival, this episode dives into how voices actually work with singer, composer and vocal coach Juliet Russell. Steve and Juliet get hands-on with twang, resonance, breath and projection, and how to use technique to serve feeling rather than flatten it.
In the closing section, Steve reflects on the album Matters of Life and Death by Nathaniel Dye and the honour of his MBE, talking about producing music in the shadow of terminal illness, and how craft, humour and community sit alongside grief.
What we cover
Finding twang safely: Practical ways to access brightness and cut without trashing your voice.
Warm-ups that translate: Simple exercises that move straight into songs and real-world singing.
Technique serving emotion: Keeping character and vulnerability while getting technically stronger.
Spaces & stages: How different rooms, from book tents to Wilton’s Music Hall, change what your voice can do.
Matters of Life and Death: Producing Nathaniel Dye’s record and what it means to make something joyful and true at the edge of life.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I'm a musician, performer and composer from London, and this is my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces.This is the show that helps you to hear, understand and enjoy music in new ways.Hello, welcome to episode 24. It's lovely to be back in your ears. It's been a while.It's been quite a while. I know that the sort of schedule has been a little bit erratic recently, and none more so than now. I think the last time I spoke to you was at the end of November.It's now January, 2025. And yeah, there's been lots of reasons for that, some of which I will go into today, and others in future episodes. All good.Lots of stuff going on, some stuff that I'm gonna dig deep into later this year that I was doing in December. And yeah, apart from anything else, over Christmas, I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year and all that stuff, by the way. But over Christmas, we did a slightly mad thing, and myself and my partner took our kids to Morocco.We picked them up from school. We went straight to the Eurostar terminal, and we got the train to Paris. We stayed a night in Paris, and then we got the train to Barcelona.We stayed a night in Barcelona, and then we got the train to Agacidas, which is the port town in the south of Spain, which apparently is where the great guitarist Paco de Lucia is from, which I didn't know, so it was nice to see statues of him everywhere. And then we got the ferry across to Morocco, and we spent Christmas in Tangier. And the reason I mention that is partly because obviously that was a great adventure and didn't give me a lot of time, as you can imagine, with two young kids doing that journey there and back.We did the same thing on the way back. But I also mention that because I had the chance to hang out with some amazing Moroccan musicians while I was down there. That wasn't really the purpose of the trip.The purpose of the trip was to have a bit of an adventure this Christmas because for reasons I'll go into, next episode, it was a bit of an anniversary year of something quite big that happened in my life, which I'll talk about in episode 25, next episode, little teaser. But yes, I wasn't there for the podcast, but of course I can't resist getting my nose stuck into any local music scenes wherever I am. Didn't have time on the way down through France and Spain sadly, but I did dig into some incredible Gnawa music from Morocco while I was there, so there's some of that stuff to come.But yeah, it was a really fantastic trip. It was a great chance to hang out with the family, but it didn't give me a lot of time for podcast things. But yes, here we are in 2025 and I have very big plans for the show this year.I've got a lot of stuff in the pipeline. And I've got so many incredible interviews and bits of music making recorded from the last few months. Some of which date back, yeah, probably almost to sort of spring 2024.I've just got a lot of stuff in the can that I need to work on over the coming months and get into a state that I can get it into your ears and eyes, which is something I'll be talking about again next episode. But yeah, all sorts of stuff coming up. So apologies for the slightly wayward schedule in the last few weeks, but it's for good reason.And there is a lot of stuff coming up in 2025. So stay tuned. In episode 23, if you haven't gone back and listened to that yet, please do go and have a listen.A really fun episode where I talked to a great throat singer from Finland about all sorts of... She also plays a kind of sort of Finnish zither instrument. We talked about making zithers out of skateboards.We talked about different throat singing traditions from around the world. That's Pelkkä Poutanen. I had a go at throat singing, which is notoriously very difficult, and I made it sound even more difficult than it already is.I was not good at it, but it was very fun trying, and that was courtesy of the Womex World Music Trade Fair that was in Manchester this year. So thank you to them and thank you to Pelkkä Poutanen. But I really enjoyed that interview with her.And also I spoke to Audio Gold, purveyors of fine vintage hi-fi equipment. They're based up in North London, and they have an incredible shop stuffed literally floor to ceiling. It's an old bank, so they've got bank vaults full of this incredible vintage hi-fi.And they're not the kind of snooty hi-fi shop that you might think they are when you say vintage hi-fi shop. They're absolutely lovely people in there, and really helpful, really interesting, really passionate about helping people listen more intentionally, I suppose. Listen with a kind of intentionality, rather than just having stuff on in the background.Background music is also fine, of course. But I think the idea of listening through a system, whether you're spending 200 pounds on it or 60 grand on it. In fact, I did a listening test on that last episode where I listened to the podcast theme through a pair of 200 quid speakers and through a pair of six, well, I think the whole set up of the system was about 50 or 60 grand.So a lot of money versus 200 quid. And you know, they were both great in their own ways. I mean, you know, obviously the 60 grand set up sounded pretty massive.But the 200 quid set up did as well. And I think again, it just comes down to listening with intentionality and focus. So yeah, I really enjoyed chatting to them.Speaking of all your gold, since I would last talk to you, of course, I had my Wilton's Music Hall Show back at the end of November. It was such a fun night. Audio Gold were there.They provided a beautiful hi-fi, beautiful record player and lovely valve amp and some gorgeous vintage speakers, which we put on the stage at Wilton's Music Hall. If you don't know Wilton's, it's the oldest music hall in Europe, I think. And it's one of the most beautiful rooms in the country, as far as I'm concerned, to perform in.Yeah, we had a fantastic night there with that lovely hi-fi, which I was using a lot on stage throughout the night. But also, of course, my amazing guests, and I had a lot of guests, a glut of guests for that one. I had Robin Ince, who's a very good friend and long- standing colleague of mine, and a huge inspiration for this podcast and for a lot of the work that I do as a comedian and as someone who has done incredible work, I guess, popularizing science communication and talking about science in a really interesting, dynamic way.And I talked to Robin partly about how this is essentially what I'm trying to do with this podcast, but for music rather than science, you know, trying to take a very broad brush strokes view of music from all over the place and all the different disciplines and instruments and people making it. Kind of examine them, pull them apart, see what we can learn, see how we can enjoy music in new ways, as the strap line of the podcast says, and put them back together again. So, yeah, anyway, it was lovely talking to Robin.We also had the amazing tuba player, tuba virtuoso, that rarest of all things, Theon Cross. Theon is a real legend of the UK jazz scene. I think he's currently in New York playing, I think it's New York playing at the Blue Note with Ravi Coltrane and all sorts of things, so he's a real jazz legend, and it was great talking to him about the tuba.He and I played together a little bit, and we had a fascinating discussion. And also Guy Pratt. Now Guy is an amazing bass player.I had a fascinating chat with him about the many amazing artists he's worked with, Michael Jackson, Madonna. He co-wrote the song Vindaloo. We talked about all sorts of stuff, so it was a really fun evening.And I had a surprise extra guest who I'm going to be talking about at the end of this show. Anyway, so that was the 30th of November. So if you missed that, don't worry, I've got the full thing recorded.It's going to be going up on my Patreon soon. The full show was professionally filmed and recorded. So I'm just in the process of mixing that and that will be up soon.So if you join the Patreon, you can watch that whole thing or listen to that whole thing if you like. And of course, all of those interviews will be in edited form, dropped on the podcast over the coming few months. But if you did miss that one and you're listening to this either before or on the 16th of January 2025, my next Wilton show is incoming.It's happening this week, so not very much notice. I'm afraid that is going to be really fun. I've got some other brilliant guests for that one.I've got Frances Ruffel, who is a Tony Award winning musical theatre singer and incredible sort of standalone singer. She I'm going to be talking to her partly about Eurovision because she was a very popular Eurovision entry in 1994. She had a brilliant song which she's going to be doing at Wilton's on Thursday.And so do come and listen to her doing that. She and I are going to be she's going to be singing. I'm going to be playing with her a little bit as well, which is going to be fun.We've got Sarah Louise Young, who is an amazing cabaret act. She does a lot of stuff about tribute acts, which I find fascinating the tribute acts. Very big, of course, all over the world.And she did a show that I saw last summer, which was a kind of homage to tribute acts, which I thought was really interesting. And she's going to be doing her own kind of cabaret tribute of sorts to the great Kate Bush. So she's going to be performing in her kind of alter ego as An Evening Without Kate Bush is the name of her show.And she's going to be there talking about tribute acts and Kate Bush and the role of music in cabaret. And then finally, I've got an amazing percussionist all the way from Brazil. His name is Alu Anashimento.He and I were doing some work together recently. And I just thought, I've got to get this guy on the podcast, especially on the live show, because I think we're going to do a lot of fun stuff around body percussion with the audience. And we're going to be talking about various Brazilian musical traditions and percussion traditions and all sorts of stuff like that.So, and once again, Audio Gold will be there with their beautiful hi-fi, providing the sound for the night. So yeah, that's on the 16th of January. That may have gone by, by the time you listen to that, and my full apologies for getting this to you.So close to the date. But again, that will be going up on my Patreon in due course. And of course, all of those interviews will be chopped up and put in podcasts over the coming months.Also, the next Wilton show is on sale. I think by the time you listen to this, it should be on sale. It's on the 30th of April.I haven't announced any guests for that one yet, but you can imagine with the calibre of guests we've had in the last few and the variety of music, live music and chat and entertainment and everything else, you know it's gonna be special. So 30th of April, and I'm gonna be dropping again in my Patreon or on my mailing list a special offer code for that one. So if you want cheaper tickets to sign up to my mailing list, originofthepieces.com or you can find my Patreon on there as well.On with the show.So, coming up on today's show, I have an interview with Juliet Russell. And Juliet is a vocal coach and a singer, and we had a really interesting chat about how the voice works, different strategies for using your voice. I think it's both really interesting from the point of view of how singers use their voices, but also there's a lot of really useful stuff in there, even if you don't sing or you've got no desire to sing at all, just in terms of how to control your voice, how to protect it and how to project it as well.So yeah, I really enjoyed that chat with Juliet. I did that at Also Festival last summer. I did a live podcast show there and that was really fun.If you don't know Also Festival, it's a small little boutique festival in the Midlands in the UK. It's in I think July and it's a really great little festival. There's obviously music and there's comedy, but there's also a real glut of great writers.So there's a lot of non-fiction writers, science writers and writers about the arts, but also of course lots of novelists. And yeah, it's a really festival of kind of ideas as well as music. There's a lake there that you can go swimming in or paddle boarding in.It's really great. Anyway, so you should sign up to Also Festival if you haven't already. It's one of my favourite festivals to do.And after that interview with Juliet, I'm going to play a little update from a previous guest on the show who also appeared at my Wilton's show in November. So stay tuned for that. But without further ado, here we are at Also Festival back in July 2024.And I'm talking to Juliet Russell.You've been doing a lot of stuff this weekend, right?Yeah, I actually was one of the founders of the festival, so I stepped back for a few years ago. But I always do a festival choir, getting people who just come along. In an hour, we work on a song and then perform it later at the festivals.A lot of the audience become performers. It's always amazing, like I think, you take 30 or 40 people who've not really met before, not sung together before, and create this beautiful moment. Last night was so joyous.It really elevated me, actually, it was quite moving.What made you want to do that? What made you want to start the choir like that?I've always done it. So since I was 16, I've been leading choirs, which is quite unusual, but I was in choir. So I didn't really do a lot of music at school.I did it more at my primary school. I grew up in an area where you had great music service. So it's free, you could go to choir.So I just kind of grew up. It was always the way I expressed myself. But there's something in bringing people together to create something that would be different on any other day.It's that thing with those voices, those people on that day. And there's something beautiful both in community but also in us all expressing our innate musicality in that way and sharing something. So a lot of it is about community and bringing people together.I think it's something I talk about a lot on the show, about the idea that as musicians, you and I have studied for many years and practiced and all the rest of it. That is building on an innate sense of musicianship, right? What we're building is technique, which we'll talk a bit more about vocal technique and things.When I'm practicing the trumpet, almost everything I'm practicing is trumpet technique. The musicianship, if you like, is related to how I play the trumpet or is related to how you sing or whatever. But that is something that you can nurture without necessarily needing to get really good in an instrument.Yeah, absolutely. Because I think one of the things that draws me to voice is, you don't have this amazing musical instrument. You do, like your larynx is tiny and it produces a wealth of amazing sounds.But actually, you are the musical instrument. It's not that you have it, you are it. So there's something about connecting to your voice as you, as an instrument, expressing yourself, that for me is quite magical and unique.Yeah. Of course, as you say, because pretty much everyone has got a voice and can use it in some form, it's immediate, it's right there and you can practice wherever. I just wondered, speaking of that, just as a very quick aside, before people came here this morning, you and I were both making silly noises off in the woods.Because I need to warm up the trumpet before I play, for lots of technical reasons to do with my lips and my breathing aphorism. But could you just talk a bit about what you do in that process of warming up? Yeah. Today, because it's day three of a festival, and I've been singing a lot and talking a lot over loud music, my voice, as you can hear, is a little tired. I'm a human and that's the other difference is you carry your instrument around with you all the time.But a good hack for warming up and cooling down your voice is straw work. So you take a straw, put it in some water. I'm just going to make a noise.Would you mind holding this for a minute? So literally just a drinking straw and just do this.So that slide is called a siren, which because it sounds like a siren. But what that does is the straw is lengthening your trachea, which is where your vocal folds sit, your larynx is. Let's think that tube says a longer space for the wave forms to oscillate.So they basically just move around in waves and resonate. But also as some of the air molecules leave as you're singing outwards, some of them move back. So it's called, I'm going to use a technical term, but I'm going to explain what it is, semi-occluded vocal tract exercise.So a semi-occlusion is just a partial closure. Your vocal tract is basically that tube where your vocal cord says you're trickier. So what that does is some of the air molecules move back, and you create the perfect environment for vocal efficiency.So it means your vocal folds meet in a great way. So if you've got a presentation to do, if you're a bit tired, those kind of things work brilliantly for your voice. So that's what I'm doing, basically.Interesting.Making noises.Because I've not heard that straw thing before. That's amazing.Yeah, it's great. Lots of singers use it now.Because you get the back pressure from the water, not right, right?Yeah, so the water creates a little bit more resistance. You can use just a straw. You can do like trumpet sounds.That's the same thing. So when you see singers going like... I mean, it is a bit annoying, but it's also, it is for a practical reason.I've talked to soul singer Ola Ola-Napoli. Oh, yeah.Yeah.And we were talking a lot about the vocal break. Yes. And that's where a lot of the work is done, right?Well, I call it the transition. Because I think break, in terms of like young, as I said, now is breaking voice and you're breaking your voice. I think anything you're talking about breaking immediately sets you up to fail.In Italian, they've got a beautiful word, which is passaggio. And that means it could be a pass in football, it could be a corridor or transition. And really, that's what's going on.It's just because we don't talk about the break in our muscles as we lift something and our biceps and triceps cross over. And really, your muscles around your larynx are changing over.So you'll hear that transition point in there. So that was very good.Interesting, grand break, isn't it?Yeah, exactly. So that's called a falsetto flip, technically.Okay. And that's going from one type of voice to another. Because when we talk about the human voice, as with any instrument, there are different techniques and there are different places you can go to with it.One of the key things with voice is the different types of voice, is that right?Yeah. Well, technically, there are four vocal registers. I'm sure if you look at global music, there are more in terms of contemporary Western voice science.You've got Vocal Fry, which is…It's basically American podcast voice.Yeah. Lots of people use it. It's an emotion.So if you're tired, you're naturally probably have a bit of Vocal Fry. Or it could be emotional. So Adele's singing like, I heard…That little… It's also called a creak. So do you want to try a little Vocal Fry or creaks?This little… Very good.You can get… If you imagine you're a pilot, ladies and gentlemen, you're coming… It's kind of a vibe, isn't it?Yeah, I'd love to be a pilot, do you? So that's one vocal register. Then you've got thick folds, which is basically…Because the vocal folds, which people call vocal cords, they're actually their folds. That's… Like if you just do that, O.O.Or even A.A.Yeah, that's your chest voice or thick folds, lower register, however you like to call it. Technically, that's a slightly different set of muscles. Then if you do your woo-woo-woo, and that's head voice or thin folds or falsetto.A lot of technical people don't like saying head voice, it's not actually in your head. But so many singers use it that I think those terms are all interchangeable. I don't know if I can do it today, but I'll give it a go.There's Whistletone. So if you know Minnie Ripperton's Loving You or Mariah Carey's Visions of Love, that's Whistletone. So there are four vocal registers.But within that, you've got different timbres. So I could have a breathy timbre, like maybe Donna Summer.Ooh, feels so good.You know, it's that breathy timbre or aspera. You can be, actually, there's a twang. Do you want to hear a twang?So twang is like, you hear it loads in country music like, you're cheating hard. Yeah, and it's naturally like an American, sorry about to any Americans, accent. But it's also really useful.So if you hear Alicia Keys singing, it's used in the soul and gospel as well. If you hear Alicia Keys singing, like, I'll keep on falling in. She's not singing bells, she's not like, in.It's in. So if you just give me like a, nyan nyan nyan.Nyan nyan nyan.And yeah. Yeah. So you went, yeah, in thin fuzz.Yeah, yeah, yeah.Yeah, yeah, yeah.That's it, yeah. So you can go to a slightly more kind of, nyan nyan nyan side and that will help you get a little bit of an acoustic boost without working too hard vocally.Interesting. And again, all of these techniques, they're sort of tools of expression, right? They're part of the creative palette.I mean, some of them are practical because to be able to be heard properly. So opera singers, for example, unamplified singers have got particular techniques that are practical. But a lot of these, much like with the shells and with instruments and the development of instruments sort of mirroring the development of human expression, if you like, human abstract expression.It's a bit the same with vocal techniques, right? You're giving yourself a palette of things to be able to express.I think you've picked up on something really important. We talk about it technically, but it's not as emotional. If you're really excited, your voice will come up here naturally, and if you're tired, it will be here.So a lot of those vocal features we've just talked about, they're in your voice anyway, you just have to match it to the emotion. That's why it's so important when you're singing to think about what you're trying to communicate, because actually your technique will come from that emotional connection. If you say to a singer, lift your soft palate, or who knows what that is, like there's micro movements, you know, and so if you say, try it in an excited voice, you're much more likely to get a good result, so you'll know what an excited voice sounds like.I think that taps into something broader as well, about instrumental technique as well. So often if I'm playing, for example, a ballad on the trumpet, if I'm playing a beautiful jazz ballad, I'm thinking about maybe about the lyrics often, and certainly about the intent and the expression, and that will carry through to my tone. And so if I'm teaching people, we can ask us whatever on the trumpet, you can talk all day long about the technical side of things.A lot of it isn't under your direct conscious control, so a lot of it is about tapping into the emotional place, and then working backwards to secure the technique that you've learned by getting there through that, if that makes sense.Yeah, totally. And music is emotional communication. That's what it is.And obviously it's musical communication, but it's... music moves you without any words. Singing is obviously linguistic as well, often, but it's beyond that.So it's a whole other means of communication where we can understand each other at a very different level. It's not involved in that kind of cerebral place, it's involved in the sort of feeling.But we've been talking about this technique stuff and you've worked a lot as a vocal coach, right?Yeah.What are some of the barriers for people who might want to improve their speaking voice or their singing voice, even if it's just in the shower or in karaoke? What are some easy tips to get people thinking about their voice more consciously?I think, like we talked about for those sirens, our voice will do what we do when we need it. So if someone's about to get run over, you go like, hey, you wouldn't go, hang on my diaphragm, because it'd be too late, but you would be like by the car. So the other thing to think about is a lot of things that are kind of popular in singing are kind of on that edge and there's a real connection between anger and joy in terms of that heightened emotion.We all have those capacities within our voices to express ourselves how we want to. But I think a lot of things is because music is all around us, what you're hearing is mastery, but often what you don't see is those decades of learning and everything that's gone into it. It's like getting fit, you can totally access that part of the voice.If you've got a larynx and you can speak, you can honestly sing if you want to and people say, oh, I'm tone deaf. But it's incredibly rare to be tone deaf, something like 2 percent.I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's one in tens of thousands, I think. It's extremely rare for people to be genuinely tone deaf. It does happen.It's very, very rare. I think again, part of the point of the show is to try and help people unlock their natural musicality and again, to understand that that is different from your ability on an instrument. You can appreciate music, you can listen more deeply and more deliberately to music in all sorts of new ways without having to do, run your scales for hours.I highly recommend running your scales for hours and learning an instrument and learning to sing properly. That's an incredible thing to do and everyone should try it even if you don't ever perform or anything. But it is different from being able to unlock your musicality, right?We've all got that innate rhythm. We've all got those ways of vocalizing. So I would say just mainly give it a go.I think a lot of people get put off by someone saying, you don't say that to babies when they fall over. You don't go, oh, you rubbish at walking. Give that up.It's the same thing. It's just like, just learn it. It's fine.Join a local choir. There's some great things like singing for the terrified if it's something you're worried about. Go and do it because quite often if people have had a couple of drinks, they're uninhibited.You're singing along to tracks. I learned very much when I was younger, singing along to records. I was singing a song and I'm going, oh, that quite suits me.I can sing that. Anything that feels good to you just can follow that curiosity and follow that enjoyment and it'll soon build up, I would say.It's worth saying in terms of singing along to tracks, that's also the way a lot of musicians, since the invention of recorded music, certainly jazz, that's the way people have learned. Now, you can study jazz at academies and there's a lot of written stuff and it's very important and a very important way we learn it. But of course, for many, many years and for most of human history, we weren't relying on reading music, we weren't relying on fancy Italian or German words or whatever to do that.People were learning by listening and copying. Even now, as a jazz musician, something I do is listen to other people and then try and play along. Play along not just the notes but the intonation, the expression. Miles Davis talked about how he used to listen to singers a great deal. If you know anything about jazz, you wouldn't necessarily associate Miles Davis with Frank Sinatra. But Miles Davis was a huge Frank Sinatra fan and used to put on Frank Sinatra records and play along and really try and imitate the phrasing that Frank would do.Because Frank, for all his many faults, was a master musician in terms of how he phrased those tunes. I think an instrumentalist can learn a lot from singers and vice versa. Playing along or singing along and learning directly from people without any, again, sheet music is fantastic.I don't want to do down sheet music or anything like that, music theory. But that's one way.It's like learning a language. There's a whole wealth of oral tradition out there. We don't need that sort of Western reading just because you don't need music doesn't mean you aren't musical.It's like if you speak French but you don't spell very well, it doesn't mean you don't know French. It's just the other way, isn't it? I didn't know that about Miles Davies and Frank Sinatra, but I think Miles Davies really has a voice on the trumpet and you can always know it's him.I think great instrumentalists have that voice.Absolutely. Well, again, you developed that tone. Just briefly to talk about timbre, we mentioned it earlier just in case anyone is not quite sure what we mean.That's basically where we can play the same note on different instruments or even on the same instrument in a slightly different way. The core fundamental of the waveform, the frequency, is the same, but they're different what are called overtones. So the different waveforms stacked on top of that and sometimes below are different and they're in different mixtures, right?So that's why if I play a note on the trumpet, if I play this note and then you sing that note. Yeah, that's the same note, the same pitch, but the waveforms are lined up differently because of the shape of the vocal chords, the vocal folds, the vocal tract and the shape of the instrument. So I can play the same thing on a flugelhorn, which looks the same as the same pitch, but it will be a very different sound.So the trumpet player, for example, will play the trumpet and the flugelhorn. They're exactly the same pitch, they play the same thing. The flugelhorn looks bigger because it's got a bigger bell and stuff, but it plays exactly the same.It's just a different tone, different timbre. And so that's what we mean when we talk about that. We were talking about instrumentalists having voices, and I think that's when we're talking about timbre, that's something that is very important.And actually what's really important about that is you will have your own timbre. Like your voices is individual to you as your fingerprint, and that's a beautiful thing. And that's why talking about choirs earlier, what everyone brings to it, your unique thing is creating that overall sound.So what you're kind of physically constructed in your own unique way, and that's part of what's giving you your vocal uniqueness. And that's one thing I absolutely love about voices. You always know, if someone rings you, you know who it is, even though now it comes up on your phone.You always know who it is, because you've got that sonic fingerprint.Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's why babies can interpret and understand their mother's voice and their father's voice, even from inside the womb, because they're used to hearing that over and over. And speaking of babies, when people think you must have to have enormous lungs to sing well or to play trumpet well, I always use the example of babies.Babies don't have enormous lungs. Babies have tiny lungs. But they're able to really belt, as we all know, because basically the equation, if you like, between air pressure and resistance in their vocal folds is just absolutely spot on.Well, their larynx is higher. It moves down a little bit as they get older.But what I mean is that you don't need loads of air. Oh, you don't.No, no, no. You totally don't. And actually that thing I said about, you know, if you go, hey, if you've got a lot of air, that actually works against that sound.So sometimes we think, okay, I'm singing big breath. But you only ever really need enough.And it's the same on the trumpet. People think, I must have huge lungs. You don't have to have huge lungs.What you have to do is to be able to control the air very carefully, which is to do with the muscles here and to do the lips and everything else. But I'm using about this amount of air.So tiny, tiny amount of air, tiny, tiny amount of air. And as I add more air and push this hole, the aperture in my lips wider, the note will get louder.So that's just adding more air. And even then, I'm using about this much air. Still not that much.I used to teach trumpet quite a bit to adult beginners. And the first thing they have to do when they get a trumpet, and kids do the same thing, but adults are worse. They go...You need to tone that down by a factor of about 100, because you need a tiny, tiny amount of air. If I blow that hard into a trumpet now, having been playing for 25 years or whatever, I will get a very, very loud air splitting sound. But that's because I can resist the air here.And I guess it's a bit the same with the vocals, right? If you try screaming, don't try screaming, because it will damage your voice. But that's where you can basically blow out your vocal folds, is that right?I don't think about it like that. I think what can happen when you've got a lot of breath coming through the vocal folds, sometimes the vocal folds do what's called pressed phonation. That just means the vocal folds start to work a bit harder to connect.So if you've constantly got a lot of breath and you're singing at quite high intensity, that will be tiring for the voice. I think as well to remember that breathing for singing is interactive, so your voice quality impacts your breathing as much as your breathing impacts your voice quality. So if you're singing in a breathy way, you'll be losing more breath because the vocal folds aren't in their closed phase when they ripple. When we make sounds, your vocal folds are opening and closing, but kind of rippling in two directions, the length of the vocal fold and the mass of the vocal fold. So if you've got a very breathy vocal quality, you'll be needing a lot more breath because more is escaping as you make the sound. It's quite an interactive.It's quite recent research, 2016.So a lot of this stuff is relatively new. Now, we've been talking about this a lot. It's time we should probably put some of this into practice.I wondered if we might be able to get the audience warming up their vocal folds. We've done a little bit of warming up earlier.Yeah, let's do a bit. We have some different voice qualities. Should we stand up?Let's stand up.So let's do a disco.Woo woo woo. One in time, three and woo woo woo. Very good and give me an, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.Good and I want you to give me a little oh. Can you feel that little kick of phonation? And that's known as a glottal onset and that's great for connecting with your lower voice.You can do it anywhere but the vocal folds meet before the sound comes out. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Now we're going to twang and go, yeah, yeah.Lovely.So you hear that change in voice quality and then we're going to.Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Brilliant.So we're going to do oh, oh, oh, yeah, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.Three and oh, oh, oh, twang.So the second one is a bit pushy. It goes oh and oh, oh and yeah. Yeah.So let's try again.Two, three and oh.Yeah, now you're riffing.Very good.Really good. So your rhythm there was gorgeous.So that's a little bit messy because you were like, oh, oh, oh. But let's go.Very.Lovely. So you can hear that syncopation in that. So let's do that together.We'll go another.Good.Good. Yee-yay-yo-yah.Yee-yay-yo-yah.Lovely. So can you feel you're traveling between those two registers in that point? Yeah, gorgeous.Let's try a little higher if we can do it.Yee-yay-yo-yah. Yee-yay-yo-yah.Yee-oh.Yee-oh.Lovely. So you can hear you're using a quite loud sound, but you didn't need a lot of breath. Yeah, you just kind of do it quite slow.And so a lot of those kind of more powerful sounds or acoustically bright sounds are quite spontaneous sounding. So it's that joy. Let's sing a little bit of.Bring me a higher love.Two, three, four, one. Great, and let's do that.Higher love.And. Lovely. The next line has a bit of syncopation.We're gonna go, bring me a higher love. Two, three, four.Bring me a higher love.You can hear the rhythm is different on the second one. So let's do the first one. One, two, three, four.Bring me a higher love.Two, three, four.Yeah, good. So that's known as a pushed rhythm, so it's slightly ahead of the beat. So yeah, great.Beautiful.Well done. Thank you, everyone. Yeah.Excuse my roguely voice.I'm sure I'll get it back.It's just human.It's just human.Well, thank you so much for listening, guys, and a massive thank you to Juliet.Please give her a huge thank you for having me, and thanks to all of you for being part of it. Thank you.Do you have anything to plug of your own?On Tuesdays, I do a Tuesday tutorial on Instagram. I do a little free vocal exercise, which I started in lockdown, because it's such a hard time for singers and musicians. So it's just like a little exercise, a minute long, and there's about over 100 on there.Well, that's a great idea, a little bite size.Yeah, exactly. Just a little minute long. Yeah, so it's Juliet Russell, just Instagram.Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. Give it up for Juliet Russell. And my thanks once again to the brilliant Juliet Russell and everyone at All So Festival for making that possible.No genre tombola today, but I've been having a lot of fun at live shows recently, including the Wilton's ones, where I've been drawing the genre live on stage. I'll be put my spreadsheet into the random list picker, and it will pick a random genre for me in front of an audience, just so people can see that I don't cheat it. Yeah, so there's some really fun genres to come, which you'll hear about soon.But to finish out this slightly shorter episode today, I've got some really nice news about a previous guest on the show. His name is Nathaniel Dye, and if you go back to episode 10, you can hear my interview with him. I talked to him partly about running the London Marathon, playing the trombone throughout, played the trombone whilst running the London Marathon, which is quite extraordinary and mad achievement, even in its own right.But when you factor in that he also, very sadly, has terminal bowel cancer, that is quite something. So we talked about that, and we talked about the role that music plays when you're in a situation that he's in, this horribly devastating situation of having terminal cancer, and the value that music has brought to him during that really difficult time. Yeah, anyway, I really loved doing that interview with him back in episode 10, so go back and have a listen to that.But the lovely news about Nat is that he's just been awarded an MBE in the New Year's Honours List. So for international people who might not know what that means, it's this kind of slightly antiquated, but nevertheless very prestigious and important system we have over here called the Honours System, where people get awarded honours for doing great work either in their community or in their job or whatever it might be. And yeah, it's an extremely high honour indeed.Member of the British Empire, which is a bit of a problematic title, but leaving that aside, it's an amazing thing to have achieved. Nat has achieved that through his tireless work campaigning for the NHS, the National Health Service over here in the UK and also campaigning about bowel cancer awareness and bowel cancer support and that kind of thing. So huge congratulations to Nathaniel Dye.And after I interviewed him, Nat actually asked me if I would produce an album for him. He's a trombone player and a teacher, but because he has this, he calls it the Bowel Cancer Bucket List, that he's been ticking off all sorts of things. So after he ran the marathon playing the trombone, he did Lanzenta, Gianna Grotes.He's been doing all sorts of extraordinary things. And one of those things was recording an album of piano and vocal music, kind of piano ballads album largely. And that's a sort of amazing thing to do because he's never done that before, right?I mean, he's a music teacher and a wonderful trombone player, but that's quite a different skill set to doing a solo piano and vocal album. So we recorded it as live on a beautiful grand piano up in North London and he sang it live, so no overdubs or anything like that, just raw in the room piano voice. We did this back in the spring and I mixed the album and produced it and I'm glad to say it came out very recently, I think it came out over just before Christmas.So yeah, do check out Nat's album, it's called Matters of Life and Death. I wanted to call it Songs in the Key of Death, after Stevie Wonder's album, Songs in the Key of Life, but he, I think probably correctly overruled me and went with a much better title of Matters of Life and Death. It's really, it's very poignant, this record, it's really beautiful and heartfelt and emotional, a lot of it.Nat did an extraordinary thing, playing it and singing it all just in one day we recorded it. And yeah, it was a lot of, it's a lot, it's a lot. It's an emotional roller coaster for him and then of course, for me mixing it to some extent as well.But yeah, I think he's done an amazing job with it. So I thought what I would do to round out the episode is play a track from this record, which is one of the more upbeat ones. There's a couple of really fun comedy songs on there as well.So to round out the episode today, this is the first track on Nat's album. The album is called Matters of Life and Death. I think you can get it in all the usual places.Or if you search for Bowel Cancer Bucket List, you can certainly find Nat that way. So to finish off the episode today, I'm gonna hand over to Nat. But before I do, just to say thanks once again for listening.Do spread the word. Again, loads of exciting stuff coming up in 2025. And sign up to the Patreon.You can sign up for free if you like, or you can pay me a pound or five pounds a month, which really helps to keep the show flourishing. And you can sign up to my mailing list, originofthepieces.com and of course social media and all of that stuff as well. Meanwhile, the theme song is by me and Angelique Kidjo and played by Hackney Collery Band.Thank you to Juliet Russell and also Festival for having me last summer. I'm gonna be back there this summer as I say. So do get your tickets early.I think there's still an early bird price. Anyway over to Nathaniel Dye from the album Matters of Life and Death. This is public service announcement.