3. New placements: Moving your voice forward, singing brighter,
4. Singing like we talk
Estelle had her first lesson this week! Estelle - you did awesome!!
Each week I'll break down our lessons into a few different categories:
"We vocalized on", "We worked on", our progress videos, and reminders to bring a new song at the appropriate times.
At our first lesson we introduce so many things:
Vocalizing:
Estelle was so great at vocalizing! She has a great ear, awesome range, and an amazing voice. I'm going to send her old voice teacher a thank you note for making my job so easy!! We are going to build up her voice every lesson, working on each register to extend her range and comfortability with it, bridge the gaps between registers so that she can access high and low notes with ease - and make her into a big strong powerhouse of confidence! We will also work on Estelle's ability to manipulate her voice to cater to whatever genre she wants to sing - this starts in our vocalization exercises as we will continue to build out the different parts of her voice.
We started moving her voice into a place she's never felt before right away with our vocalizing. Even though it was strange - she was all about getting crazy with me, which I appreciated so much.
It's in our vocalization exercises that we do all the hard work. I start to move the student's voice into extreme versions of the placements we will use from here on out - it is in these exercises that we build and work towards extending their range, building stamina in their voice, and we start to build the placements from scratch, starting with singing how we talk. We make sure that our vocalizing exercises become strategic instead of a typical warm up that makes the student feel like they sound pretty while vocalizing. We use different exercises to emphasize different things.
Estelle really was so awesome!
Relaxing the voice while singing:
I make all my students promise me at the beginning of their lessons that they will do all the silly ridiculous things that I ask them to do because it will make them a better singer. It was so great that Estelle had no problem trying all my crazy methods!
You'll see this in their videos as I make them wiggle in a variety of weird ways. Some of the motions are to remind them to do very specific things (there will be a lot of forward arm movement - and in this case touching her teeth). Some of the motions are to distract them so that they can't squeeze their vocal cords when hitting exceptionally high or low notes in their song - you can't hurt your voice, or sing incorrectly in an unsafe way, if you're rolling your head and moving your shoulders. The movement helps us accomplish what we need to - and later we take the motions out the more lessons we have and more we move into performance technique.
New placements:
A new placement with our voice is an interesting thing. With our first few lessons we're trying to get Estelle to feel her voice in a completely different way. We do this not only for sound quality and vocal technique but also for safety of her cords. We are trying to get any ounce of pain or tightness out - and give Estelle the ability to control every part of her voice 100% of the time. While we will work on building Estelle's voice as well - our new placements will make sure that she doesn't hurt it as we continue to add power each week.
The first placement we introduce is singing like we talk. While the students are figuring out how this feels with their voice we break it down in ways that are easy to do. We call this "talk it out". We are working to bring a more natural pronunciation of the word while making the sound even bigger by widening vowels, lifting the soft pallet even more, and further brightening the sound (or making it sound more clear and happier).
I remind each student in real time of the different things to focus on in their song.
Now you know what to expect for our lesson breakdowns!