Customer Reviews

The New Voice: How to Sing and Speak Properly

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I agree wholeheartedly with the first reviewer. This book tells you how to sing, not just what should happen in good singing. I don't know of any other book that spends the time needed to address setting up the structure for singing and especially the tongue and high larynx which causes most of the problems that as a voice teacher I encounter! This is amazing.getting over the urge to gag is really worth it! I'd like to be in contact with other teachers and singers who find this really great. It has meant so much to many of my students who went to teachers who seemed to be afraid of this approach and who use only the ear and imagery to overcome real physical ignorance or misunderstandings. There is help out there for the tight, retracting, tense and lazy tongue. What freedom this offers!!!!!!

I had extremely high hopes for this book when a friend just happened upon it and gave it to me as a gift. This offered a completely different approach to the voice that was in contrast to Mark Baxter's book that I was also studying at the same time. Since the approach made so much sense to me I threw myself into the excercises whole wholeheartedly for months and spent hours a day doing all the various exercises with a high level of diligence. I desperately wanted it to work and even went as far as to try and contact Alan Greene. Although I wasn't able to find him, I did find a former student of his who studied this method and we talked briefly on the phone. Although he couldn't offer tips or specifics, he said the method did work and that you just had to do the excercises. Perhaps there was some missing piece here for me, but after seeing (or rather hearing) no difference in my voice after several months I eventually abandoned it.

Incidentally, I really be interested to hear from people that it *did* work for though.

This book is wonderful and enlightening. It addresses the structure of your instrument, your voice, and he trains you how to use it properly. You start by NOT singing. You exercise using certain muscles and not using others. It is dramatically different than anything else I've read or been taught. There are three mechanisms that work together to produce your sound: the sound-producing mechanism, the sound-supporting mechanism, and the word-producing mechanism. He gives you many exercises for each. It will seem weird at first, getting used to a new concept. As a singer, I never had thought about how I made sound, I just sung and if it sounded bad I'd get frustrated and try to blindly fix it. But this book teahces you how to do it properly, so that even if you're under stress you will be concious of how your voice is reacting and still be able to sing properly. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in singing or even speaking publicly.

I was sorry to hear that one of the reviewer had no luck with "The New Voice" method. As a voice teacher and singer for my entire 65 years of life, this book was nothing short of an answer to prayer. I have been having vocal problems for about 6 years and had reached the point where I would no longer do solo work for fear my voice would fail me. Not singing for me is right next to not breathing. I was broken hearted to think I might not sing again. I had been to doctors, coaches, teachers and speech therapists and no one could find the problem - nothing physical showed on the cords and my technique, though always something that could be improved, was holding up well. This book taught me how to physically control and thus open the throat when I had always been taught and taught students using imagery since it seemed impossible to actually control the muscles. I am back to singing high Bs with almost as much ease as I did in my twenties. With lots of practice, it has worked miracles for me and many others with whom I have worked.

If you are a good singer or have a good voice, this book was not written for you. Although even Harry Belafonte endorses this book.

If you want to acquire a good voice or singing voice, then this book is for you! Nearly all introductory books I've read on singing deal with practice or very basic ideas; but do nothing about tension stored in the vocal tract. This book does. If you don't relieve the tension, how will you ever sing well?

I was working on some parallel ideas when I read this book. Look for my upcoming website [...] when I get it launched--whenever that might be.... (Sorry) ZenSinging will teach how to take the steps beyond this book.

I purchased this book more than 10 years ago on the recommendation of a friend. At the time I was in college studying vocal music. Since then I've turned to professional narration and voice-acting ([...]).

I spend hours nearly every day speaking into a microphone for corporate narration and training. I must be able to maintain resonance and clarity.

I find that performing even a few the exercises helps me to protect my voice during hours of narrating.

The results have been well worth the effort in learning to control and strengthen the "involuntary" muscles in my throat so they work for me not against me.

If you're looking for a book that is just as good at COMMUNICATING what you need to do as telling you what to do (with poor articulation how to do it) this book stands well above the crowd. - - People who intuitively pick up the concepts in the book might not need it, but my experience prior to reading this book was "general advice" from music teachers who probably were only repeating what their teachers were telling them, but didn't understand it themselves, "Don't sing through your nose... sing from the stomach!" (True, but what does that mean... I don't have a mouth, lips and throat in my stomach!)

As for the approach, Greene presents the physiology of singing and shows you how to feel the different muscles and parts of your anatomy and use them... some of the advice helped me almost instantly, others took time to develop. - - An example includes pretending to yawn when you produce a tone (without yawning) or sighing rather than forcefully expelling the air (this gets your adam's apple into the position it needs to be to sing. He even suggests wearing a bow tie to feel where the adam's apple is... though, of course, nowadays few people actually have bow ties. - - This physical approach really gets to the point.

All in all, I have recorded as a pro musican, but haven't done a vocal CD... recently through I've been sharing my singing with other musicians and they've been REQUESTING that I do more singing... not complimenting me, but ASKING me to sing... that says a lot, especially for a person who up until a few years ago couldn't carry a tune or try to sing without coughing and gasping for air.

A one of a kind publication... Seems dated with a forward from Harry Belafonte and Walter Matthau - - hope it will not fall by the wayside... deserves immortality! - - Not a gimmick, but full of techniques that are so good they almost seem like magical gimmicks, except for one thing... They really do work !

Hi, I bought this book a couple of months ago and it is great!
I'm doing the exercises, they are not so easy but very useful.
I'm looking for someone who is doing/has done the program, to speak about the program.
My email: olmoelisa@mail.com

Sandra