This week we worked on: rounding out Emma's placement, her mix voice, range extension, relaxing into high notes, and widening her vowels.
We did an extra long warm up this lesson, working towards building up Emma's mix voice. She tends to shy away from things that aren't powerful, so we're working on getting her mix voice to a place that she likes it even better than trying to pull up her chest voice as she gets higher! (What we worked on last lesson - with taking her whole voice forward with power at once to smooth transitions instead of having shelves in her voice that are hard to sing through) She's doing great!
Rounding out placement/widening vowels: Emma has our initial base "forward" placement DOWN! I'm so proud of her. She knows how to sing it through her teeth, she knows how to put it in the correct placement. From now on, this first placement - we'll call "hit the wall" placement.
Meaning - it takes our forward placement to the extreme, making sure that Emma can feel her voice go all the way forward. This has been a very key part of our lessons.
As we continue, we're now "rounding out Emma's placement" and "widening her vowels". Essentially we're making Emma's voice sound a little bit more natural, taking off the rough edges that come with that initial forward placement. The cool thing is, we're doing this while building Emma's mix voice, and smoothing her transitions - so it sounds prettier and prettier every time she sings!
In order to do this Emma widens her vowels to an "ah" place, and follows through with our forward placement to a rounder place in the front. It is also teaching Emma stylistic things as well as texturizing.