For Giovanni Scalmana

For Giovanni Scalmana

Friends,
Today I want to speak to you directly about singing. Your performance has indeed improved—I can hear it clearly. The voice is cleaner, the intonation is more stable, and the excessive pressure you used to apply on the mask has lessened. This is real progress.
But listen carefully: your resonance is still overly concentrated in the nasal cavity. The breath support is being carried away, and the sound ends up stuck in the mask, making it thin, floating, and lacking the support of the chest cavity. Remember—never force resonance in the nasal cavity.
I want you to practice producing high notes without nasal sound. You can crumple a tissue into a soft ball, block your nose with it, and then sing softly using your body. You’ll hear a new kind of vibration. If you listen carefully to recordings of Francesco Albanese, you’ll notice his voice resonates in the chest. The mouth shape needs adjustment so the breath naturally flows into the front of the chest. Sing from the chest, and let the breath from the abdomen support the sound of the chest cavity. The mask must never be forced—it should only serve as an echo, not as the source of the voice.
Now let’s talk about your high notes: I hear that your high notes are still hitting against the soft palate and mask. But here’s the truth—before singing any high note, the abdomen must push upward, creating a massive column of breath that extends down to the very bottom of the body. In this state, you must lift the soft palate, raise the back of the head, and let the abdomen firmly hold the breath pressure.
Understand it this way: a high note is like a small balloon rising inside a larger balloon. The high note floats at the very top of the breath column—it is not produced by blasting all the breath upward to strike the soft palate. Right now, your high notes lack the upward support from below; they rely too much on the upper cavity, without the foundation of chest and abdominal support.
So, remember this:
Train the body, train the breath. Adjust the mouth shape so the air flows into the chest cavity. Trust the chest to carry the resonance. Use the abdomen’s strength to support the sound in the chest. The mask must never dominate the voice—it can only be an echo, never the foundation.
If you can establish this balance, your high notes will no longer be tense or forced. Instead, they will rise naturally and freely on the great pillar of breath. That is the true path of bel canto.
I made a picture to illustrate this.
First, when you sing, you need to draw in both sides of the face. The purpose is to prevent the sound from shooting directly out of the mouth; instead, the sound should first penetrate into the body. The vocal cords are only an outlet for the air, not an amplifier. Increasing the volume does not come from speaking-like projection, but from allowing more breath to enter the abdomen and using abdominal air pressure to control the volume.
That’s why, as you can see in the picture on the right, it is necessary to expand the waist all around. By expanding the waist, you create body resonance, which naturally enhances the volume.
One more point: after your high note ends, your abdomen is already out of breath. In contrast, Albanese’s high notes end as the result of breath being controlled in the abdomen. But for you, the sound simply disappears in the mouth. Then what happens with the following phrase? You often break off, or stop singing altogether, and then go back to preparing the breath before inserting yourself back into the singing. This is a bad habit to imitate.
When a high note finishes and the next phrase begins, the tone quality must remain connected and consistent. You cannot stop or interrupt it. Of course, since we are practicing, interruptions are understandable, but this exposes the fact that your breath cannot guarantee continuous support throughout the entire act of singing. You should always have breath available, ready to sing at any moment.
If you let the high notes concentrate entirely in the mouth, then no matter how much breath you have, it will quickly be used up. Some people say that singing must be done with “inhaled singing.” What does that mean in essence? It means letting the sound pause inside the body and releasing only a small amount of breath with the tone, so that the high notes or long notes can be sustained.
I’ve already told you—get your phone translator ready, and I can sing this song for you as a demonstration, to show you how to use the breath correctly.