Straining

Hi Camille, I've made a lot of progress with your exercises and stopped straining to reach high notes, developed very good cord compression and smoothed out my chest and head voice, but I notice that I strain when I want to sing louder. What can I do to remove that? :)

Good question, Teodora! I'd make sure you're adding power mostly with increased body engagement, rather than "squeezing" or "pushing" from your throat. That gentle "pushing out" feeling in your low abdomen (from your normal "breath support" can intensify to a little more of a "lean" or "slight grunt" feeling. 

More power can come from increased compression (AKA vocal effort) and/or increased breath support/air resistance. The two go hand in hand, in my experience! But another thing you can play with is brighter, more "forward" or nasalized resonance - that's not necessarily "power", but it sounds louder and more powerful. 

Teodora, Diaphram support! Make sure you are getting solid breathe support when you sing. Now, I suggest utilizing the lip trill exercise in daily practice. It teaches the diphram and vocals chord how to interact with one another. It's a great exercise. It is a foundational exercise that gets you into that place we need to be as singers. 

Thank you! I am making solid progress with breath support, and straining only occurs here and there in songs right now, not in warmups, but luckily, less and less frequently because I'm trying to implement everything I've learned in songwork.

One more question - my lowest notes in the range are much quieter and less stable compared to the rest, and that's quite frustrating because I sing country music where I often have to make big leaps, so you can clearly hear that my low note is much weaker when I drop down to it from a higher one. And if I try to increase the volume in the lowest chest register, I lose the pitch. Is there anything that could be done regarding that?

Teodora, the easiest way to approach those low notes (from higher ones) is to "speak" into those pitches, rather than full-on singing them. Practice speaking on pitch, until you can sustain those pitches. You can also use a narrower mouth position (more closed vowels), to reduce the size of your vocal tract.