Relaxing into our placement Today we worked on softening the harshness of our forward placement even more. Because Abby has been working so hard in voice lessons for so long - she has developed the muscle memory of our placements, giving her a strong forward voice that has smooth transitions, and an excellent range that she can access without putting unhealthy pressure on her cords! Now, what we are working on, is accessing this, now natural, part of Abby's voice instead of having her hit the wall (or sound like our harsh version of our placements). In order to do this, we worked on distracting Abby with movement so that she wouldn't squeeze her vocal cords - and wouldn't take her voice to the other end of the spectrum and let her singing monster in (or sing in a back/thin place). The other awesome thing about adding our movement today was that it also helped Abby get her wiggles out throughout the whole lesson resulting in even shorter and more infrequent breaks! We accomplished this by throwing and bouncing a ball back and forth - distracting Abby's mind - while having her sing our new song "At last i see the light". We first went over switching into our forward placement with our vocalization exercises. Then sang through our new song several times, making sure Abby was in the right placement. Then, we added the ball. Bouncing the ball, essentially does the same thing as adding choreographed movement for a performance - giving our brains something secondary to focus on, forcing our voices to relax into what we're doing. In the next 2 weeks we will replace the ball bouncing with this movement, getting our song performance ready! She did awesome!!