Rachael Thoms Music

gets me right in the feels every time I listen to her. What an artist! 😍😍😍

This is one of her achingly beautiful songs… seemingly simple, but sophisticated, delicate, and perfect in every way.

I could tinker with this work of art for hours and never get bored! ❤️❤️❤️

Why do I look like a chipmunk hoarding nuts for winter while I sing? 🥜🐿️

That’s a tongue trill with puffy cheeks, a semi-occluded vocal tract exercise.

The trapped air behind a small leak at the lips creates back pressure that pushes gently against the folds from above, so they don’t have to slam together as hard to make sound.

The tongue trill makes back pressure rise and fall, further softening how hard the folds collide. It also keeps the tongue busy.

Tongue and laryngeal tension tend to travel together, and it’s common for the tongue to unnecessarily “help” with pitch changes that are really vocal fold work, not tongue work. My theory is a trilling tip has less spare capacity to interfere.

Try it with interval glides, scale patterns, or as a mid-song reset when things feel tight.

It’s not about mastering the cheeks, it’s about finding easier phonation and carrying that ease into your singing.

If your cheeks keep collapsing, that’s usually too much air, not too little, so ease off.

Skip it if your mouth’s dry, you can’t hold the seal, or your tongue won’t trill (that’s wiring, not failure), and use a lip trill or straw instead.

One exercise isn’t a strategy. If you want to know whether this is the right tool for your voice, that’s what a singing teacher is for.

Save this, give it a try, and let me know how it goes.
What are you actually training in your practice?

Ever wanted to sound like a bee with main character energy? 🐝🐝🐝 Ask and you shall receive.

This one’s for a new follower who messaged me about wrestling with tension and not being able to find “the mask.”

Here’s the exercise I pointed them to: Y-buzz, a tool from Arthur Lessac’s work.

Start on a buzzy “yee” or “yih.” Notice where it tingles, lips, teeth, front of the face.

The Y keeps the tongue high and forward, and the bright vowel makes it obvious the second the sound turns breathy, dull or effortful.

It’s a useful coordination if your chest voice feels weak or heavy, if your sound has gone dark or swallowed from “making space,” if onsets are unstable, or if you’ve been over-breathing for years and need to get more sound from less air.

Opening the buzz into a “yoh” or “yeah” can also help register transitions and projection stay clear without shouting.

One caveat: feeling the buzz up front doesn’t mean your voice actually lives there. If it starts producing tongue root tension, nasal squeeze or a gripped jaw, that’s your cue to back off, not push through.

This isn’t the sound for every song and it’s not the fix for every voice. If you’re working through any of the above, it’s worth a try, ideally with a good teacher watching and listening.

Save this to come back to, give it a go, and let me know how it feels.

What are you actually training in your practice?

Why am I singing with a pencil under my tongue? Turns out deliberate practice needs office supplies.

Do you notice loss of resonance as you ascend in pitch? Difficulty with register transitions? Muscling instead of flowing?

Your tongue might be pulling back and down into your throat. That narrows the space at the back of your mouth (your pharynx) and restricts your larynx’s freedom to move.

A protruded tongue with the tip curled around the pencil forces independence. Your jaw stays quiet. Your tongue does its own work without recruiting the back of your throat. If it starts creeping backward, you lose the stability to hold the pencil. It drops. That’s your feedback.

Here’s how to do it: Take a clean pencil, place it under your tongue, curl the tip around to hold it gently. Sing a simple phrase on “a” as in “cat,” keeping the pencil in place and your jaw released and still.

Listen: is the tone clearer? Smoother through transitions? Once you’ve found that sensation, drop the pencil and see if you can carry that same freedom into your regular singing.

This isn’t about permanently singing with a pencil. It’s about using constraint to teach your system what release feels like, then transferring that into your singing.

If this resonates with you, save this one and come back to it regularly.

What are you actually training in your practice?

Why am I motorboating my way up and down a scale while rolling my shoulders like a Gen Zer rolling into HR to discuss their boundaries?

This is a warm up, not a technical exercise.

A technical exercise trains a specific coordination or fixes a habit. This is different: I’m not trying to fix or control anything, I’m tuning in.

The lip bubble, the Rossini pattern (up the tonic, down the dominant), the Ah to Ee shift and the shoulder roll aren’t correcting anything. They’re how I check in.

Does changing my tongue position disrupt the airflow or throw off how the system coordinates? I tend to hold tension in my shoulders, so I roll them to feel just as free as I want my voice to be.

Whatever shows up is information, not something to fix on the spot.

Oh, and about that 20 to 30 minute warm up you religiously repeat before every gig… the idea that this raises blood flow to your larynx has never actually been shown in humans. The larynx sits at body temperature already, blood flowing whether you sing or not. Sleep, hydration and how much you’ve already used your voice probably shape your readiness more than warm up length does. Also, what’s genuinely under-researched isn’t warm up mechanics, it’s fatigue: knowing when you’ve prepared your voice versus already dipped into vocal overdraft.

Most days, my warm up is a few minutes to check in, not a box to tick before I’m allowed to sing.

What are you actually training in your practice?

Why am I starting a chest voice exercise with the sound of a tiny haunted door?

That crackly sound is vocal fry, the lowest register of the voice. But I’m not practising it because I want my chest voice to stay permanently crunchy.

I’m using a small amount of light fry to find vocal fold contact with very little airflow, then gradually waking it up into a clear chest voice sound without suddenly throwing more breath or muscular effort at the note.

The real exercise is the transition.

Can I move from those slow, irregular pulses into a clear tone while keeping the closure efficient and the throat relatively free?

For some singers, this can be a useful way to develop a low chest voice that is clearer and more reliable, particularly if the sound tends to become breathy, disappear, or only turn up when they push.

The fry should stay light and easy. If it feels like grinding, squeezing or forcing the sound down, that’s not the coordination I’m after.

This is deliberate practice: use one sound to find a specific coordination, then carry that coordination into the voice you actually want to sing with.

The crackle is the pathway, not the destination.

What are you actually training in your practice?

Why am I marching while I sing Gee–Yah–Lah?

Because this exercise isn’t really about getting better at singing Gee–Yah–Lah.

The descending arpeggio gives me a simple, repeatable pattern.

The G, Y and L sounds give the back, body and tip of the tongue different jobs, while the jaw’s job is to stay released rather than trying to help with every articulation.

The marching adds another layer. It keeps the body active and, for me, discourages a large forward abdominal release every time I breathe. That makes it easier to explore expansion around the lower ribs and back while the tongue gets on with its own work.

So the real task is specific: can the tongue move accurately without recruiting the jaw, while breath and posture stay organised as the body moves?

This is what deliberate practice can look like. Choose the coordination. Simplify the task. Repeat it with attention. Then take it back into the song.

Songs are where the skill has to work. Exercises are where we make the skill easier to find.

What are you actually training in your practice?

What does your singing practice actually look like?

Are you singing your songs over and over from start to finish, hoping they’ll eventually get the memo?

Or are you taking time to understand how your voice works, improving the way the system coordinates, and using deliberate practice to address the patterns that might be holding you back?

Spoiler alert: it’s the latter, not the former, that will get you where you want to go.

Don’t get me wrong, you absolutely should be practising your repertoire. And it’s essential to transfer the skills you develop in technical exercises into real singing.

But don’t skip the hard bit.

If you only ever sing your songs, you’re likely reinforcing the very habits that are limiting your progress. Lasting improvement comes from identifying what needs to change, working on it deliberately, and then taking those changes back into your repertoire.

I’m having so much fun back in my home town of Orange performing with old friends for the 50th anniversary of the Orange Theatre Company Inc It’s been such an incredible privilege to tread the boards again with people that supported and inspired me so much as a young aspiring performing. If you’re in Orange, there’s still one more chance to join us today for the final matinee performance! ❤️❤️❤️