Today we continued our work on our musical theater placement. We built on our improvements from last week, taking the parts of our new placement to the extreme so that Ella could feel what is supposed to be different when singing musical theater. We made parts of it more conversational - helping Ella find the parts that feel comfortable and familiar (like the forwardness of the placement), while we stretched other parts even more (like widening vowels and dropping Ella's jaw to make a big sound without having to put extra pressure on her chords). Today Ella NAILED the vowel sounds that come with our musical theater placement as soon as she let it feel weird again.
Her least favorite line of ours is "don't try to make it sound good" - and rightly so. She's a singer. She's amazing. She knows how to make it sound good - and likes it to sound good. But when we can get her to solely focus on the feeling of the variations in our placements - because her brain has no idea what it sounds like until she hears it in our after video (it just knows that it feels weird so it fights against it) - we can separate the part of her brain that has habits cooked in to it, and expand her bag of tricks and placements, not only improving her voice, but improving the skills that she has to manipulate it!
We continued to work on widening our vowels by putting "ah" where ever we could in the word, making sure to drop our jaw to add an even bigger sound that is needed on stage!