2. Range extension in exercises / building mix voice
Musical Theater Placement:
Today we continued our work on our extreme side of our musical theater placement. In order to be able to stay in the pocket (keep up with the song) and get the big sound that a song like this requires without hurting your voice, muffling your words, or sounding like you are singing through molasses - you have to move to this wide, extremely forward place. We widened Walker's vowels while moving the "wall" in his mouth forward. (Meaning we took out all of the depth that our baseline placement has - that gives it the natural talking sound of coming from the middle of your mouth and going forward - and put it more forward so that the sound never moved back past his front teeth.
The look of this placement (until the muscle memory is built) is very much a wind up teeth chattering toy that you get from the dentist - big smile - lots of wide teeth - barely coming in to hit the consonants. We also call this placement "big Italian woman" because of the wideness of the vowels.
We are building this placement for Walker to not only use in a character song like this - but to built his chest voice for other ballads as well - adding a whole new "big" level to his power notes when he wants it or needs it.
Range extension:
Because Walker had Shades call backs tonight, we made sure to warm up every part of his range - in case he needed to use any part of it.
We continued our work on his mix voice - extending his falsetto lower while simultaneously extending his chest voice higher.
Warmed up his belt voice.
Worked on his falsetto - making sure it didn't go shrill - but that it stayed forward in a nice smooth place.
We also ended our voice lesson by warming up his classical falsetto with our hooty exercises.
He did so awesome!