Vocal Tips in 10 with Amber Mogg Cathey
Sep 16, 2026 · 9 min · 8 segments
If high notes make your chin lift, shoulder tense or whole body reach upward, this episode is for you. Amber Mogg Cathey breaks down why chasing a high note can make it harder - and shares simple…
Amber Mogg CatheyHostI want to jump in today to a subject that comes up all the time and has been coming up so much lately.
I want to give you some tips and some tactics to help you stop reaching for the high notes.
How many times have you been singing and without realizing it, if you watch yourself in a mirror or if you record yourself and you get ready for the high note right before the chin goes up to the sky, right? We just subconsciously think, oh, I'm going to just help it a little bit.
Or singers who I've worked with for a while where we've had that discussion so many times about the fact that the vocal folds don't move up, even if they did, jutting our chin up to the sky is just tightening all these muscles around the voice and in the voice itself that can make singing a lot harder, make those high notes hard to hit.
Because they've trained themselves to keep their head neutral, but the eyebrows go to heaven.
And so I always want to point out to people, nothing is up here above you but the sky.
So scooping our head up or tucking our head down for low notes, neither one of those are going to help us.
To go higher, your vocal folds vibrate more quickly and they stretch and thin out.
So they get literally thinner in mass, which is why sounds differently than thicker in mass, just naturally, if I'm not doing anything purposefully to change that tonal quality.
So scooping our head up, down, eyebrows to heaven, whatever it is, Not only does none of that help us, it actually can make things way more difficult.
So I want to give you some tips to play with today, some exercises, a few movements that I find can be really helpful to make those high notes happen with more ease.
I want to jump in today to a subject that comes up all the time and has been coming up so much lately.
I want to give you some tips and some tactics to help you stop reaching for the high notes.
How many times have you been singing and without realizing it, if you watch yourself in a mirror or if you record yourself and you get ready for the high note right before the chin goes up to the sky, right? We just subconsciously think, oh, I'm going to just help it a little bit.
Or singers who I've worked with for a while where we've had that discussion so many times about the fact that the vocal folds don't move up, even if they did, jutting our chin up to the sky is just tightening all these muscles around the voice and in the voice itself that can make singing a lot harder, make those high notes hard to hit.
Because they've trained themselves to keep their head neutral, but the eyebrows go to heaven.
And so I always want to point out to people, nothing is up here above you but the sky.
So scooping our head up or tucking our head down for low notes, neither one of those are going to help us.
To go higher, your vocal folds vibrate more quickly and they stretch and thin out.
So they get literally thinner in mass, which is why sounds differently than thicker in mass, just naturally, if I'm not doing anything purposefully to change that tonal quality.
So scooping our head up, down, eyebrows to heaven, whatever it is, Not only does none of that help us, it actually can make things way more difficult.
So I want to give you some tips to play with today, some exercises, a few movements that I find can be really helpful to make those high notes happen with more ease.
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