The Benefits Of Smiling: Cheek Muscles
- Projection & Resonance
- Fighting Vocal Fatigue
- Concentrating On Articulation
The lift is a voicercise technique that involves using the cheeks to alter your sound.
The cheeks can be applied in many ways but ultimately it’s up to you to decide what sounds best for your voice.
There are 5 important things the cheeks help with. The cheeks help with volume, tone, range, strain, and pronunciation.
Mastering these elements will give you a more fuller, rounder sound.
Projection & Resonance
If you’ve ever sung and found that you weren’t able to get much volume, check your cheeks.
Your cheeks should raise in a way that when you sing louder and higher you are creating more space with your cheeks.
Try to vertically lift them up, almost as if you were smiling. This moves your muscles out of the way so the air from your diaphragm can freely move out.
This allows you to push more air, thus increasing your volume. Your tone is something that is heavily influenced by your cheeks.
If you’ve seen any gospel singers, you will notice they are always smiling very deeply. This helps them have fuller sound and use their vibrato more effectively.
The tone is much brighter and easier to maintain. This is similar to having a conversation on the phone with someone who is smiling.
You can hear the positive intent just by listening to the sound of their voice.
The lift enables you to control simply by adding your cheeks at the necessary points of a song.
Fighting Vocal Fatigue
What are the necessary parts of the song? That is dependent on the individual, your range determines what notes are harder to sing.
By raising your cheeks you can sing higher notes. This allows us to expand our range to sing higher notes more clearly by raising our cheeks.
Singing higher notes means that your vocal chords have to vibrate faster.
To make them vibrate faster you need more air and push. That air and push tends to get stuck behind the muscles if you are not using your cheeks.
Try to actively use your cheeks in parts of the song where it gets higher or louder. That will help to make sure you don’t strain your voice.
You can strain your voice if you continue to sing while your voice is fatigued. It is always best to take a short break, and drink some room temperature water.
Continuing to sing on a tired voice can cause vocal nodules(calluses on the vocal folds)that can make it harder to sing and speak.
This requires treatment for recovery, so make sure to take care of your voice and use your cheek muscles.
Concentrating On Articulation
There is an easy method to tell where you can use your cheek muscles.
Think of the vowels you use. A,E,I,O, and U. These are the vowels that produce open sounds, thus they are the only vowels to effectively use your cheeks on.
Pronunciation is very important when singing. Singing with a closed mouth can make us sound muffled or shy.
If your cheeks are up, there is no way you can sound quiet. This makes it so you have to pronounce each vowel with an open tone.
Improving your tonality can take some time.
Start small with lift exercises doing 20 lifts per day. If you think that’s easy, increase the quantity of your exercises by 5 each week.
This will make it so you are making consistent progress and setting reasonable goals.
