Up

How To Throat-Sing
STEP 7: Hints and tips

Japanese page
If you couldn't make the flute-like sound, there are two possible causes. They are very important because they are directly connected with the way to improve your throat-singing.

Firstly, your mouth chamber may not have a proper shape or volume for resonance. Change them carefully according to the instructions in STEP 5. Slow and careful changing of the chamber will help you to find the resonance. Try to change the shape of the front of your mouth too.

Secondly, it's quite possible that your vocal "oooo" doesn't contain sufficiently strong harmonics that can resonate in your mouth. (Is your "oooo" very soft and calm?) Beginners sometimes give up before getting the hang of this.
The sound wave which resonates in your mouth has quite a high frequency. Thus all you have to do is vocalize an "oooo"-sound which contains sufficient high-frequency sound energy. I don't mean that you vocalize "oooo" one octave higher! I mean that you should vocalize with as bright a throat-sound as possible. (If Louis Armstrong had tried throat-singing, he'd have been successful!)
To get the proper "oooo" sound, imagine the following situation: when you're practising throat-singing, some one comes up to you angrily shouting "Be quiet, man!" and strangles you. Naturally, you keep practising. This would result in a strong, bright tone from your throat. You got it! You are "oooo"-ing with an ideal voice sound.

Once you've got this voice with rich high-frequency components, the volume of the "oooo" itself may be reduced. This helps the flute-like sound to be heard more clearly. In this case, the voice which is kept while throat-singing sounds like a drawn-out "we" in English, or "oui" in French, which is written in Japanse as the letters shown in the background of our pages.


Previous Step <--------------> Next Step?


I do hope this How-to helps you.
May your throat-singing reach the Altai Mountains!

Please let us know your experience of trying to throat-sing according to these instructions.



Special thanks to Dan.
Without his native English and great work (actually, he had already mastered throat-singing by himself and introduced how to do it in the FAQ of Tuva !), the Throat-Singing Society could not have presented you these how-to in English.
Saga J Haruhiko thro@sings.jp