1. Conversational Pronunciation while maintaining power
2. Widening vowels, creating space, taking harshness out of high notes
Conversational Pronunciation while maintaining power
This week we worked on moving Estelle's placement to a more conversational place. The goal is to be able to move between talking and singing seamlessly - giving our voice a natural, bright, powerful sound that is as easy to manipulate as our talking voice. We do this by widening vowels, lifting the soft pallet and expanding the roof of the mouth, and brightening the sound by pushing it forward. When pushing our sound through a smaller place (or more narrow vowel), we get the volume of a powerful note - but the vowel becomes piercing in tone, forcing it into an unusual pronunciation of each word. By making each of the words (and vowels) more conversational - we work on building the power of the note while maintaining a big sound that requires no added unhealthy pressure to the vocal cords.
Widening vowels, creating space, taking harshness out of high notes
We are working on giving Estelle this bigger brighter sound without hurting her vocal cords - staying in our relaxed placement. The way that we do this is we: Widen our vowels: adding "ah" into the middle of our words so that night becomes "nahhhieght" ... falling becomes "faahhhhling" instead of going to a long "o" sound- giving the words a more open and bright vowel sound). Create Space: By not only lifting our soft pallet, but expanding it so that the whole back of our mouth lifts feeling like we are pushing the sound against our back teeth and smiling from the back of our mouth to the front. This opens up the sound even further - giving it that operatic "spin" or frequency while maintaining the conversational nature of the tone. Taking out the harshness: Widening these vowels also gives a powerful feel to the highest notes without sounding shrill. Estelle is crushing!! She is working so hard and is sounding SO great!!!