Because Walker is completely crushing his “baseline placement”, with each new song we start, I am challenging him to manipulate that placement in slightly different ways to get different sounds that cater more to each individual genre. Today we worked on out pop belt placement. We used the wideness of our musical theater placement - but put it into a slightly more forward and smaller place at the beginning of the words. This helps make the sound a little bit more contemporary for our pop songs and helps give Walker even more control on those super high notes. We call this place our “bite” because it is so forward in our teeth at the beginning of our words and passes through an almost chipmunk place before expanding into a bigger sound that it feels like you are almost “biting” the sound to make it go forward.
Texturizing low notes:
We also started working on a more stylized sound for our low notes. Walker knows how to keep his verses and low notes forward - now we want to make sure he can make them sound any way he wants, whether that is breathy, full of glottal stops, or scats. As we build up his “stylizing bag of tricks”, his voice will get more versatile, giving him the ability to manipulate it further and cater to each genre even more.