Adding Vibrancy to Your Tone

Do you have vibrancy in your tone? Do you know what it is?

Vibrancy is something that I discovered when I was in college and I was listening a graduate student. I remember thinking that there was something different about their tone that I didn’t have. I kept listening and thinking, what is it about their tone and how can I get that?

At the same time I was taking voice lessons and would hear about vibrato and Sopranos. Sopranos don’t really talk about vibrato so much as they do talk about spin. I began to take that concept of spin and think maybe this is what I’m missing in my tone.

I like to call this spin vibrancy. It’s making your tone alive and living. It’s the spin that Sopranos talk about when they sing, especially up in the highest registers. I don’t think of it as vibrato because the wave would be too slow in that tone. With the higher frequency the wave is going faster so you need to have more of a spin inside that sound rather than a vibrato.

I went home over Christmas break that year and thought I’m going to figure this out. When I went back to school I had figured it out. I had an oboe friend of mine saying, Holy cow, where did you get that wicked vibrato? It was so exciting to me that I actually did it.

One of the best exercises to work on vibrancy is with Moyse’s de la Sonorité, using the short tones exercise on page 16. I use this one specifically to play short tones. Moyse writes about this exercise and describes the four different ways in which to work on this exercise.

The first way is to play each note very short. A short tone can’t have vibrato it is too short. But I can make these short tones alive. All of the ways that Moyse suggest give opportunity to try making each short note vibrant. This is such a good exercise to work on because you are forced to make each note fantastic in such a short period of time.

Keeping your notes really short and vibrant is something that definitely separates the amateur from the professional. Once you figure that out your tone is going to be a notch above what it used to be. You need it in your tone.

Go get Moyse’s de la Sonorité. Check out the short tones exercise and start working on them to gain vibrancy in your tone. Make it come alive.

Have fun!

DoctorFlute

Watch me demonstrate this:

FluteTips 84 Adding Vibrancy to Your Tone on the Flute