Relaxing into our placement (continued) Today we continued to work on relaxing into our placements. With Tatum's incredible work ethic and perfectionist brain, we are working on making all the fundamentals of our placements second nature so that her brain can work hard on other things while not worrying about pitch, brightness, cadence/ staying in the pocket of a song, and hitting high notes with relaxed vocal cords. We are working to build her confidence (because she is so awesome!! and her placement and everything that goes along with it are second nature) so that she no longer feels like it has to feel hard. We worked hard on this today during our vocalization exercises especially. We added a secondary physical focal point (much like movement in a performance), but made it something you couldn't just go through the motions with. We added a big blue bouncing ball - throwing it back and forth, doing different sequences of spinning, through our legs, different bounce patterns - never letting Tatum switch back over to focusing only on her voice because we were rapidly changing our movements the whole time. By adding this ball, we are getting Tatum used to moving in a relaxed way while maintaining placements, and getting her brain used to having to focus on something else while again, maintaining our placements. She did so awesome!
Transferring our placements between genres
Today we worked on maintaining our placements, pitch, and energy while switching between songs and genres! While working on performing our new song "Back to December", performing and finding the appropriate energy and movement (because it's a slow/mid tempo ballad) was hard. When we put "Good morning baltimore" - a song that Tatum ROCKED the performance of - in the mix and had Tatum switch between the songs, the performing both songs became easier for her! It set a bar in her mind for performance energy and how much movement she should have on stage - we took the song she was comfortable with and helped transfer over all the reasons she was comfortable in one song - to the other!