 So, let's first of all just kind of learn about the major parts of how the voice work and in my acting classes, because we're always moving, I use a lot of body mapping. If you take your three fingers like this and you place them at the bottom of your belly button and then you put another finger kind of underneath the belly button, boom, we're starting to get down to your center and we talked about the center a lot in vocal production so that we kind of understand where the pelvic wall is of our pelvic muscles so that we know where the big diaphragm muscle happens. So, if you put your hands on a second, we'll just kind of show you where it is. As you inhale, you should feel your belly kind of naturally going out, yeah? And as you exhale, you feel it going in. So again, inhale, it comes out, exhale, it comes in. And what that does in terms of the inhalation, exhalation has nothing really to do with the lungs so much as it has to do with this big muscle that sits flat on the pelvic wall and we'll work on this breathing in a second. So then, of course, we have our lungs up here so as my diaphragm muscle then pushes those organs up against the lungs, that just pushes the air out of the lungs and then the air of course floats up through the larynx and all that and it hits our two vocal cords. Have you ever seen that very, very thin Japanese paper where you can literally see right through it? It's transparent almost. Your two vocal cords, which are membranes, that's about the structural strength of them. They literally are about that transparent. And so these two little vocal cords right back here are side by side and as air comes by them, they're just supposed to vibrate nice and gently and really never touch. And those little vibrations that are produced from those gloriously delicate, soft, gentle, like the babyist of babyist things that we would never want to hurt ever, those vibrations then come up and then they'll start to resonate around in our bone structure and create our voice. When we get tired, when we do vocal damage, what we're doing is with this musculature around our neck, around our shoulders, tints, yeah. We then compress all the muscles around the throat, which starts to push those tiny little membranes together. So then as they just want to kind of like flap in the wind and create vibrations, they start to bump each other. And when they bump each other, if they do that over and over, this is where you can start to get vocal damage that won't heal with just rest. You develop literally scar tissue on those two little membranes and then they can't just vibrate and create the vibration day more. And that's where you get that horse sound or you get that really thin, airy sound. Yeah, or if you remember Guns N' Roses fans, Axl Rose, his whole career went away because he had literally just slapped his vocal cord so many times, he's like singing like this, you're done. Two main things, if you ever like I lectured really long, I did eight hours. How am I going to do eight hours tomorrow? The two best things you can do, water and rest. Vocal rest, just shut up, yeah, and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Those are the two best things you can do. All that stuff you hear about like, gargle some salt water or all that actually just hurts the voice more. You can't in a pinch like right before if my voice is tired and I've got to go out and I've got to do a show tonight. I have no choice. Then I can do a little lemon juice right before, but you've got to understand you take lemon juice because that strips away the mucus that's on the vocal cords, which is not, that's like a very short term fix with long term damage. Because I took away that mucus protection that keeps them from rubbing together. I want them coated in that mucus. So the best thing I can do is sleep, drink water or some decaffeinated tea because sometimes the warmth just feels good. It doesn't really do anything more, it just kind of feels nice. Yeah, but lemon juice is not a fix, honey is not a fix. Those are just like psychological, it feels better. So one thing that we want to learn today and to think about is this wants to be soft and this is a great tool. So let's start kind of finding that. Part of what we have to work on what I mean by the voices in the body is our alignment. If I'm going through life like this, so do that. Feel how your throat just got tight, yeah? Or if I'm going through life like this, feel how your voice just got tight. Versus if my head is aligned on my spine, this should be nice and soft here. So every once in a while if you're not sure, use this tool, go up here. Same thing to the side, you can feel one side of the throat gets really tight. And that's adding tension which is now compressing those two little membranes together. So the vocal mechanism, yeah, starting with the diaphragm muscle, including the lungs, including our soft, I'm just gonna keep saying it, our delicate, so soft little vocal cords. Once those little vibrations happen, then they want to naturally come up into the mouth, yeah, and find its first ricochet point, yeah, which is the hard palate. So find the hard palate, the roof of the mouth, all that glorious bone. It's right there, ready for the vibration to come up, hit it. And if you know anything about sound theory, when a vibration is made, when it hits a hard surface and it ricochets off, then the sound wave gets bigger. It hits another one and it gets bigger and therefore louder and feels more space. So we want those little tiny vibrations that are produced by the vocal cords to come up and hit that hard palate, ricochet off and go clear out there. The problem is a lot of us go past the hard palate and feel the little soft part in the back, you kind of choke yourself. The soft palate, that soft part absorbs those vibrations. So if we're talking about here with the voice in the back or the throat, those vibrations don't have an opportunity to ricochet off the hard palate and get out. So think of your soft palate, you notice how when you put up big velour curtains in a room or big drapes, suddenly the room sounds dead, sounds soft. That's what's happening, they're absorbing the sound vibrations. So we really want to make sure when we are speaking that we are, and we'll work on this in a second, are opening our mouth wide so that those vibrations can get forward in the mouth, bounce off the hard palate and go out. So those are the key parts of the vocal mechanism, diaphragm muscle, lungs, vocal cords, hard palate, boom. As well as thinking about knowing how the body works and the vocal mechanism, the best thing we can do for vocal health is to just not think about volume at all. As soon as we think about I have to be loud, well we think about being in stands and cheering and screaming and all that comes from vocal tension. So instead of thinking volume, think about vocal dynamics or vocal energy is a way to think about that. Or vocal like, who, space. So instead of the dynamics that I need to just get from here to here, I think about the dynamics I need to get from here to that back room. Yeah, it's just a little shift. And that little shift is done all from down here, not from up here.