Hi Gábor,
Holding the tone is an extremely useful Crutch, and that severe stutterers are finding really helpful.
Lee came upon this Crutch when thinking why can stutterers (or 99% of them) sing without stuttering? Because they focus on their tone instead of the words.
So how does this Crutch work? Well, lets start by holding the tone, like singers do when they do a “vibrato”, but let’s take the vibrato. If we do this, we have a clean tone coming out of our mouth: “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”. You can do that, right? Ok, let’s put words on that tone. “AaaaaMyNameisGábor”. As long a we don’t hesitate and interrumpt the tone, or airflow, we won’t stutter. But we can’t do this with long sentences or we’ll run out of air and we’ll get more nervous. We need to do it in short bursts.
It is like a combination of Crutches 4+10.
You can go to the video Sectionof this website, and do a filtered search: go to the “tags” and select “holding the tone”. You’ll find coaching sessions and you’ll see how we explain how it works. Hope this helps!
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