Gern, how soon is this performance? I hope I can help with some advice and description of exercises.

Your daily voice exercise and singing will be important to do on a consistent basis, because it is a physical accomplishment, just like training to run a race. You have to realize you are building up the muscles and gradually getting them stronger and more under control. You wouldn't go out and run a marathon and expect to do well if you have not spent the time leading up to it in training your muscles and endurance. Nothing can substitute for a good teacher who can hear what you are doing and give you the instruction on technique to improve and change. Then, it takes daily exercising of those muscles and techniques to build them up to what you are potentially capable of doing. In the mean time, think of the muscles on the floor of your abdomen. What you need to realize is that the diaphragm is not what is breathing - your lungs are what breathes, and you just need to pull your guts down and out of the way (so the diaphragm is pulled down to give the lungs more room) and hold them down as long as possible while you control the flow of the air out of your lungs and through the vocal folds. Learning to keep your toungue out of the way, lift the soft palate at the roof of your mouth, to use the resonance chambers in your skull, etc., and RELAX while doing this, are all a part of using the breath support to project a good sound when singing. I describe the messa di voce exercise in one of the other threads, but in case it is buried and hard to find, here it is again. Choose one note to sing "ooooh", pull the muscles down in your abdomen, let your belly and sides and ribs expand as you breathe in a full breath to fill your lungs. Begin singing the note as softly as possible, then as you count to eight in your mind, gradually increase the volume, loudest sound as you reach 8, and then gradually decrease the volume back to your beginning soft volume, counting backwards from 8 to 1. This is all on ONE breath. When you begin to feel you have no more air to sing and you have not counted back down to one, hold those muscles down in the floor of your abdomen, keep them pulling down toward your pelvis, and you will see that you have some more air that is still able to flow from your lungs. Holding those muscles down is the key, and like doing any kind of ab exercises, like the ones to make your tummy flat, it takes TIME and daily exercise to strengthen them.

Learning to spin a tone out on a stream of air can be important in singing when you perform without a microphone. Remember, opera singers learn these old bel canto techniques, tried and true, and they project their voices over an entire orchestra. Good luck

There is a thread I started back in '99 that collects many discussions on singing and voice technique. It is long, but you may be able to find some help there. I included links to non-Mudcat sites about vocal health and physiology for singing. Check out those sites for specifics on the larynx and vocal folds, warm up, etc.

Threads on the Singing Voice - click here

Alice