Today we continued our work on our character musical theater placement! We started by studying the character - and analyzing how we wanted to play the character as we sang the song. In order to do this, we watched a clip of the song from the movie Les Mis, and I showed Jake how talked the character actually sang the song in the movie. After seeing that it didn't take away from the song to simplify the verses, but that we could do really cool things stylistically to make it sad, vulnerable, and more catered to the specific scene - we started adding in our "talking placement" even more. We worked on taking vibrato out of the first part of the song entirely so that we could build to big powerful notes as the song continued.
With the second verse, we then worked on building the song from there, adding things like hitting our consonants hard so as to bring more intensity and volume to the second verse. (We worked on this last time as well, but today's lesson we were able to go into more and more depth because of Jake's AMAZING break through with our placements and his voice!!). Once Jake could feel the conversational nature of our musical theater placement, he was more willing to use it in the song - which made for REALLY cool moments of Jake realizing how cool a song can be without having to add things that are unnecessary sometimes like unhealthy pressure on our vocal cords, vibrato and style that doesn't necessarily fit the song or genre.
Wow. He was SO great!!!!!!
High Belt (Musical Theater) / Relaxing into our placement
We also worked heavily on Jake's high belt.
At first, discovering that "over singing" (adding unhealthy and unnecessary pressure to our cords, adding heavy vibrato, and adding too much power instead of giving the song dynamics) wasn't something that we needed to do, at first, Jake's stylistic choice pendulum swung the other direction - taking all the power, big notes, and crescendo moments out of the song. While this choice is totally fine - and sounded awesome - I wanted to make sure Jake knew that he COULD still build do a big powerful place, using the correct placement. And, when he did, he would be able to hit his high notes easier, sustain them longer, and hit them more frequently because of the lack of strain on his vocal cords.
We worked on approaching our high notes from our forward/talking place that we used in our verses, first lengthening our notes, and then widening our vowels - all the time pushing the sound forward so that Jake's sound remained bright and in tune!
Once Jake felt confident in his transitions - we just had him sing!! AND HOLY COW. Like i said before - this was a total break through lesson for him where our placements and all the weird crazy stuff we've been doing all the sudden clicked and made sense.
He finished his song excited that he couldn't feel any of his high notes - that they were easy.. and that he sounded SOOOO awesome!! I'm excited for you to see it!
Here are our videos from today!
Before/End of our lesson:
Great job Jake!!!! Wow. What a lesson!!! See you soon!!