With this song, we're trying to expand Olivia's bag of tricks. We're adding in more and more style, texture, scats, and melody variations to take her baseline placement to the next level.
We worked on belt and soft belt, scats, adding bluesy drawl while keeping our voice forward, widening our placement, and shelving.
Belt and soft belt:
Because this song is Adele - it has A LOT of belt in it. However, unlike a typical ballad song - the belt is placed throughout the verses and chorus (not just in one part of the song). Because of this, you can't build like you normally would and then bring your voice back down afterwards. You have to be prepared to insert belt with certain words. This takes a lot of control - especially if you want it to sound smooth. We worked on these transitions by inserting soft belt periodically at the beginning or end of words to help smooth the transition from head voice to chest voice to mix voice. It helps maintain the power and not feel like your voice is all over the place.
Scats:
We're getting into heavy scatting in our exercises, and working on adding our own in the song. Scats are much harder when you don't have someone to mimic - or you don't hear the original artist do them in the song. We're training Olivia's ear to be able to put them in herself by varying the scats we choose and having her add them where she thinks they would sound best.
Bluesy drawl:
Olivia's voice is so so awesome on Adele/ bluesy songs! Bluesy songs require more depth than a typical pop song. Because most people associate depth in their voice with falling back - we are working on adding depth to the front of Olivia's voice - allowing her to maintain the forward placement, not hurt her voice, and still get the gritty feeling she wants in the song. To do this, we are manipulating pronunciation of certain words, scooping up to a few notes (instead of hitting them straight on), and widening her placement even further so that her vowels are even bigger.
Here are our videos!
Before/End of our lesson week 1:
Before/End of our lesson week 2:
Great job Olivia! See you soon!
Labels: Olivia