High belt Today Erin really wanted to focus on her high notes for both, "Don't rain" and "Journey to the past". So, 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 - even more so than when we adjust the placement of 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 anymore. It triggers something in their brain that says "this isn't powerful" or "this feels weird and wrong" and my favorite.. “This probably sounds terrible”. 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 our vowels (to give it a bigger sound), start by pushing into our mix voice (or Pinocchio placement), and add a lot of movement in our head and neck to prevent the tightening of our throat and vocal cords.
Placement transitions (continued) Today we also worked on the transitions between "Journey to the past" (musical theater - disney princess placement) to "Whenever you Remember" (Pop Ballad). The things we focused on were: Journey to the past: Hitting hard "r" sounds - making the song feel more like a monologue than a song. Working on the acting even in the vocal intonation! Whenever you Remember: Making our vowels uncomfortably airy and wide to add as much style as possible - simplifying our verses and widening the vowels on our high belt in our chorus!