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 Erin's awesome voice! With each song we sing, we use a slightly different part of our placement in an extreme way:
Whenever you remember: 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!
Journey to the past: The remaining 3 songs of Erin's for our show are different variations of our musical theater placement. This one is our disney princess musical theater - where we focus on the emotion of the words, the excitement in the voice inflection, and really talk it like a monologue. From there, we build into our high notes using hard "R" sounds to make it sound more character (as opposed to our big pop ballads where we soften the "r"s). Don't rain: This is our big musical theater ballad - we use our "big italian woman" placement - where we make our words big, exaggerated, with wide vowels, and hard consonants - giving it the biggest sound we can (while staying in the pocket with our hard consonants and slightly punchy feel), without adding unhealthy pressure to our cords trying to achieve a big huge sound. We get the sound without the hurt! Step sister's lament: We will work more on this song in coming lessons! Erin did so awesome!