1. Brightening up our bottom notes/ setup of our high notes (continued)
2. Consistency of tone
3. Moving to a more natural sound 4. Brain work!
Brightening up our bottom notes/ setup of our high notes (continued)
This week, we worked on brightening up our sound across our whole vocal range - starting with the low notes. Estelle was struggling with her transitions between her belt/chest place to her mix/head classical place. The low notes felt easy for her, but she was having trouble keeping the tone consistent and pushing the high note forward. We started working on making sure her placement was correct - forward and bright, through her teeth, with wide vowels, and a talked base - with her low notes, to complete our placement loop instead of trying to pull her high notes all the way forward from a farther back place. The reasons these transitions were so hard for her once we started moving the concentration of Estelle's tone, was because the set up of each of her high notes was forcing her voice to do extra work to try and bring the note forward (think of instead of continuously climbing a set of stairs, that every time she went to hit a high note, she went down 2 stairs and was expected to jump to the same stair she would have been on if she had continuously climbed).
Us brightening Estelle's sound is not only awesome for her high notes, but it is making her low notes sound even better - and making every note easier to sing.
Consistency of tone
Today, we also continued our work on Estelle's consistency of tone. As we continue to move the concentration of her tone from going straight down the middle, to widening the top of her mouth, lifting her soft pallet even more, and sending the tone out the sides of her teeth - we are now making sure that her voice sounds the same throughout her song, and that her transitions between talking, singing, high notes, and low notes - are seamless and sound effortless.
Moving to a more natural sound
We also continued our work on moving to a more natural/ talked sound! Estelle is getting better and better at understanding and executing our forward placement, and the more she does, the more comfortable she is using it. We start from our talked place in our vocalization exercises, and condition Estelle's voice to trust the feeling of sounding like she talks. Brain work! Today I also had Estelle apply all of our hard work from the beginning of our song - to the rest of the song! As we've worked hard on very specific parts, vowels, and how to get to our placement correctly and easily with certain phrases - I wanted Estelle to figure out how to apply the principles to parts of the song we hadn't yet worked on. It was really cool to see her work through each of our steps to get to a bright, correct, forward place! You'll see her figuring it out in her after video - Wow. She did so great!