2. Making the switch in our brain from "talking" to "singing forward"
Adding energy to our talking voice
Today we worked on getting our song a little bit more stage ready. We talked about the things that we could add physically to make our song more interesting without changing our placement at all. I had Kate talk the words of her song like a monologue - using her awesome acting skills that she has been developing in our classes - while paying attention to the energy and breath in her voice, her voice inflection and how the story of the song would come alive when she was committed to telling it. We then worked on transferring as much of this over as possible - adding energy and breath to her song, emphasizing certain words with harder consonants like she did when telling the story as a monologue, and focusing more on how she would tell the story through song on stage. Our goal - is to start to build Kate's musical theater placement - a placement that uses our talking placement more than our other placements because of the 'story-telling' nature of the genre.
Making the switch in our brain from "talking" to "singing forward"
The first thing that happens when we introduce a new placement in voice lessons - is our goal is to separate it completely from everything that the student came in with; they come in with a "singing monster" (or bad habit/wrong placement version of singing), so we push their brain completely away from feeling like they're singing so that we can build something from scratch instead of trying to fix or change things in their brain at the beginning. Once their brains get used to the sound and feeling of our forward "talking placement" - we move it to a more singing sound - even though we keep the new weird feeling the same. We slowly start to replace their definition of singing instead of forcing them to think week after week "don't sing it at all - just talk it or it will fall out of place".
We started working on this today with Kate by having her extend her words (or shift the complete talking sound to longer notes/ ones that sound more like singing), and focus on "not singing" or using her singing monster. Then i had her watch her videos of what she had just done, and asked her if it sounded like talking or singing. When she could hear that her talking FEELING sounded like better SINGING, her brain trusted her a little bit more to maintain the placement as we moved it into a more melodic - or singing - sound.
We will continue to work on this so that her old habits don't creep back into our new placements - so that we can only build on to what we have now, instead of going back and forth.