4. Shifting our style to work with our new placements
Making our placement more conversational
Today we worked on moving Emily's voice to a more conversational place - taking our forward placement and making it sound and feel more natural and less extreme. I still want Emily to feel our new placement, still want her to push it forward through her teeth, brighten the sound, and feel like she's talking through it. I want her to feel the difference between our placements and techniques and the ones that she came in with in our first lesson, but now I want our placement to feel a little bit more comfortable for her. At the same time - we are rounding off some of the rough edges Emily had to develop for maximum effectiveness, when we moved Emily's voice to our extreme "hit the wall" placement last week. By rounding off these edges - Emily starts to sound more and more like she is singing in a natural way.
We go slow like this so that Emily never has the opportunity to go backwards, it keeps her moving forward (with both her progress and with her voice).
Following through our words
When moving to a more conversational place - our singing monsters tend to come out even more than usual because it feels a little bit more like we are singing our songs (rather than just talking them out). Because of this, one of the most common things to happen (if the student commits to sending the beginning of the word forward), is pulling the sound and placement back into your throat at the ends of words - muffling the sound, trailing off in the wrong direction, muting the sound, or adding style that is placed incorrectly - making it harder than it should be (and keeping it from sounding bright).
To combat this singing monster hiccup - we focus on feeling each word like a water fall - finishing our words even more forward than we start them so it feels like they're falling out of our mouth.
This helps us reset the beginning of each word that comes next - into our forward bright placement, keeping the beginning of our words from sounding muffled or dark.
Separating our words for maximum control
When trying to build the muscle memory of our new placement, sometimes our brains try and hit the first word of a phrase in a forward place and then string the rest of the words together, slowly falling more and more each word until we reset at the beginning of the next phrase.
When this happens - the line will fall flat in pitch or fall back into our throats, giving us less control of how we place each word. When we focus on separating the words into syllables in our brain, throwing each syllable forward or resetting our placement with each one, our brain doesn't register our "singing monster" habits and fall back. It simplifies the sound, giving us more control of the tone, pitch, brightness, and timing.
We emphasize this separation (especially in the beginning of our voice lessons) with physical movement to help remind us in real time - using our fingers in a forward throwing motion.
Shifting our style to work with our new placements
Because we are spreading our lessons out a little bit more than usual, I wanted to make sure that Emily felt like she could use our new placements when she sings everyday. In order to do this, I had Emily add a minimal style by the end of our lesson, focusing on aiming the style forward - and only adding it as it worked within our new framework.
As we continue to build Emily's voice and muscle memory of our correct placements - her style will get easier and easier to add (and easier to sing because of the lack of tension in her chords).