Relaxing into our placement (continued)
Today we continued our work on relaxing into our placements! We have moved this from strictly a voice thing (working on relaxation through vocalization exercises, movement, and how we approach each note) - to relaxing into our placement in our brain as well. The simple way to say this is "not trying so hard" or "not over singing it" - but the way that we translate that into our voice lesson language that makes way more sense is: approaching each song, phrase, and word from a more conversational place, trusting the pitch to be correct because the placement is correct, and focusing on something secondary. We add these secondary focuses slowly at first to make sure we maintain our correct, genre specific placement - and then add more and more performance technique, movement, choreography, character, and microphone technique as we get more and more comfortable with the placements we've worked so hard on. Tatum has worked so hard for so long on our placements, matching pitch, and singing with relaxed vocal cords - that now it is very much the default way that she sings! Her before videos have skyrocketed - giving us more and more room to work on more advanced things every single lesson. We are working hard to convince Tatum's brain that all of the fundamentals are there so that we can move towards working on more stylistic things!
Separating words
The main thing we are using to try and trigger our correct placement and pitch is separating our words. When our brain has time to reset between each word, check the placement and pitch, and execute each word as if it were it's own phrase (instead of singing the first word of every phrase correctly and then slowly falling out of tune and out of placement, losing our bright sound as the phrase goes on) - the timing is easier to keep, the pitch is easier to find, and our brain can start to add those secondary things that we are trying to move forward with (style, character, movement, choreography, microphone technique, performance technique).