Mastering Resonance: What Great Singing Can Teach You About Great Copy

There’s a certain way you can hit a vowel while you’re singing, and it rings.

If it’s a low note, you feel it vibrating through your whole body. If it’s a high note, you feel it dancing just outside your head while your whole body stands under it, supporting it like the bottom of a cheerleader’s pyramid. In either case, the sound is set loose in the room, and now it has a life of its own. If you’re in a good room where the acoustics are decent, it will dance around the room and come back to you from behind, picking you up in the wave it made.

I swear this isn’t an article about singing. It’s about your messaging, so stick with me here.

If you can master this kind of resonance, you can become a legend.

I remember working one summer with Grace Bumbry, a true legend in opera, and how she would sit at one end of a room full of masterclass students and demonstrate how a note should be sung. She sat comfortably in her chair, her posture impeccable, but not working too hard. Her mouth would open as if in relaxed conversation, and suddenly this enormous sound was coming up and hitting me in the back of the head.?

I could feel it in my own body, as if it had taken me over.?

This, I thought. This is how I want to communicate.

When I’m editing copy, the greatest allergy I have is against what I call Vanilla Toast Copy (?). It’s the stuff that’s not really saying anything. It’s where it sounds like you put a bunch of ideas from your industry into a blender and tried to produce a message with it that won’t step on anyone’s toes.

It sounds like you’re not taking ownership.

It sounds like a shadow of all the people you look up to in your industry.

It’s not really saying anything.

Because it doesn’t really have YOU in it. None of your spice, none of your passion.?

Why? I think. Why should I buy from you, and not from the person you’re quoting?

You see, the key to great resonance is support and specificity.?

What makes a tone take over a room and cut through an orchestra is specificity. You have found the place where your body, that note, and that vowel all work together to spin the tone through the room.?

To get there, your body had to support that tone, which means that in order to produce that tone, you needed to be able to stand beneath it. Your very core must be engaged, and you have to believe that whatever comes from the most inner point inside you is worth hearing.

If your core isn't engaged, and if you think you have to manipulate your sound, everything up the pipeline of your sound is going to try to make up for it and help you create the sound you think you should have. Your articulators - your throat, your tongue, your jaw - they will all hop in if the note isn’t getting the support it needs and try to provide it.?

But your articulators are here to form words, not support or manipulate sound. So if they’re always on, it’s like keeping the mute in a trumpet.

It will feel like such hard work, and the sound will fall flat at your feet.?

When I’m interviewing my clients for my Tell Me Your Story offer, I listen for those moments when what they are saying rings. When I feel it in my body. It makes me laugh, it makes me want to cry, it makes me catch my breath.

It's never the thing you think you should be saying. The thing someone told you was important, but, in all honesty, isn't actually important to you.

So often, you actually have no idea what you just said that makes me start typing furiously.?

It was easy. It was off-hand. It was passionate and matter-of-fact at the same time. It was nothing short of the truth.

Because the thing that most resonates?

It’s your truth.

It’s the thing that feels like a relief - a release - to say.

It’s that thing that you preface with, “Oh, well, I don’t normally tell people this, but…”?

…and out pops the very message that is underneath it all. The very way that you truly connect with people. The sort of message that will take on a life of its own

It’s your truth.

It’s that simple. We overthink it and try to make it hard because the truth is vulnerable. It exposes us in spaces where we'd rather have remained clothed. But both making art and building a business are vulnerable things to do.

Sound and messaging have a lot in common. The ones that resonate are simple and self-sustaining. They aren’t hard to support because you can stand tall underneath them. They aren’t being dampened with a lot of qualifiers, they don’t equivocate, and they don’t apologize.

They come from who you are being, and if who you are being is powerful, then so is your message.?

Be you. Tell your truth.?

Feel how your sound comes back to you and lifts you up like a wave.

This is the first in a series of newsletters where I’m sharing my process around art, marketing, creativity and realness.?

Subscribe to Resonate so you don’t miss one, and if you’re ready to work with me to find your truth, tell your story, and dial in your offers, just shoot me a dm. I’m here for you.