Today we worked on moving between all the different placements we have worked on in order to get ready for our Fall concert! Because every placement that we do is an extension of our baseline/forward placement - switching genres, styles, or speed of a song isn't strenuous on our vocal cords, it is however a bit of a brain teaser at first. In our Fall concert, we have made sure to pick different kinds of songs so that we can show off all the different parts of Ella's awesome voice! With each song we sing, we use a slightly different part of our placement in an extreme way:
Lay me down: This is our big pop ballad. The main focus of this song is the big powerful notes (making the big triangle with our mouth, and adding "ah" to the middle of our vowels to get a big sound without having to add unhealthy pressure to our vocal cords). In the verses, we widen the vowel (as we will in our other pop songs), and adopt a lazy- kind of style where we soften the pronunciation of our words to make it sound more effortless and cool.
We also decided that this would be the song we're going to use a microphone stand on! Send my love: This song is our style song! It's not extremely range intensive (or doesn't go really high or really low) - so it allows us to focus on how much style we can put into it! In order to do this, we alter the pronunciation of our words - making this the widest placement we will use. We add an extreme punchiness (emphasizing the consonants) to give it a more rhythmic feel. In this song we go to an almost weird sounding wide place when we map out our pronunciation phonetically.
Musical theater character!
Today we also introduced a new placement (or rather a different variation of our baseline/forward placement) - Musical Theater character! With this new placement, we take parts of our baseline placement to extremes in order to sound more musical theater, and to cater our sound and performance to that of a musical theater song with a strong or subtle character performing it. We use acting techniques with this placement as we treat the song more like a monologue - mapping out how our character would act and/or react to words they are singing (if they're supposed to be happy, spastic, excited, sad, angry). We analyze the way the character should be played - adjust our talking voice accordingly - mapping out our song the same way we would a scene or monologue, with high points and low points.
We then, start to incorporate this new character like speaking into our song by first completely talking it out - making sure the energy and voice inflections are what they need to be in order for the character to shine through while we're singing. Then, we slowly elongate certain words and give our song a slightly more melodic feel. Ella did so great!!!!
Here are our snapshot videos from today!
Lay me down:
Don't love me:
Send my love:
Popular: Because this is Ella's group number - I filled in for Abby Horsley