Today we worked on our high belt placement - or how to sing our highest notes with power maintaining our relaxed placement so as to not add any unnecessary and unhealthy pressure to our vocal cords. High belt is interesting because your brain has to get used to connecting how it sounds and how it feels more than our low notes. Most of the time, the natural tendency of students when they come in is to associate high, loud, powerful notes with hurting their throat. It's a crazy brain thing when all of the sudden - their high notes don't hurt. It triggers something in their brain that says "this isn't powerful" or "this feels weird and wrong". Our job when working on high belt, is to make the sound as powerful as possible without straining at all, so, we manipulate the sound by widening notes (to give it a bigger sound), start by pushing into our mix voice (or Pinnochio placement), and add a lot of movement to prevent the tightening of our throat and vocal cords. Maggie picked a CRAZY hard song for her first song!!! Not only have we worked the last 3 weeks to change the way she sings, her placement, the way she sounds, the way she approaches the notes, and how she feels when she sings. But, because this song is so hard, we had to add some secondary things as well - one of them being this crazy hard placement of "high belt". As we continue to extend her range - high belt will get easier and easier.
She did so awesome!!
More conversational placement This week, we also worked on moving Maggie to an even more natural and conversational place in her singing in general - especially in her low notes. Now that we know what "forward" feels like, and now that we've "hit the wall" - or gone to an extreme version of our placement - we can differentiate between what Maggie came in singing like and all the things we've changed, improved, and added! As we continue to work on this baseline/forward placement, we will continue to knock off rough edges and retrain Maggie's brain so that it becomes the default way she sings and thinks about singing! Wow. She did so awesome!!!