Today we worked heavily on our microphone stand technique! We started by mapping out 5 moves that we will cycle through that are all simple, make us look confident, and are easy to remember. We then choreographed our song so that during our performance, we don't have to make anything up on the spot:
1. Our power stance and reset: We start with this when we walk on - standing shoulder width apart, keeping both of our legs straight, and shifting our weight to one leg. This helps us not only look confident - but feel steady and like we're not going to fall over.
With our hands - we bring both hands up to the microphone and grab it. We use both of these things as a reset for our song - as we cycle through the rest of them, we come back to this to start all over.
2. Pulling the stand: The same way we want to make sure we drop the microphone while we're performing to show that we are confident in where the mic is, that we know when to come in, and to show that we're more comfortable, in control, and natural, than if we held it up to our mouth the whole time - With our microphone stand, we want to make sure that we deliberately pull the stand away from our mouth to show the same things!
3. One hand on the mic - one hand on the stand: As we get into more microphone stand performing - we want to make sure we have smooth transitions between all of our movement. Going from both hands on the microphone to dropping one to the stand allows the movement to be different - yet still smooth.
4. Both hands off: Framing the microphone stand with both of our hands - making the stand a part of the song and choreography instead of ignoring the fact that it is there.
5. One hand on the mic - one hand in the air: For higher notes - we want our movement to build the same way our vocals are. An easy way to do this, is to put our hands higher. When hitting these higher notes we bring our hand that is off the microphone slightly above our shoulders. The fluidity of the movement is dependent on the tempo of the song and the length of the note- Sharper/jerkier movement is saved for quick high notes in ballads - or rhythmic movement for uptempo songs. Slower hand raising is used when holding a note in a rhythmic up-tempo song or in a ballad.
Maintaining placement
Because we added heavy performance technique today, we also worked on making sure we maintained our placement while adding this secondary focus. We wrote little reminder notes on our karaoke track to help remind us of the pronunciation of certain words - to maintain our triangle placement to brighten our sound, and of course - to smile!