With one more lesson until our concert we are in the final stages of our performance prep!! Today, we started our lesson by talking about how prepared we felt and how ready we would be to perform if we had to go on stage tomorrow. We talked about our group practice on Saturday - what we felt was the easiest part of it and what was the hardest part of it. We went through our checklist and addressed the things we felt the most confident about - and all last minute fears, mapping out how we wanted to spend the last 2 voice lessons before our concert in very specific ways.
At the beginning of our lesson, I had all my students rate from 1-10 how ready they felt. Then, we talked about why each of them picked the number they did, and what specific things we were going to do to take that number to a 10! We worked on as many of these things in our lesson as possible - and then addressed the 1-10 question at the end of our lesson to see if the number had changed!
At the beginning of our lesson, on a scale of 1-10, Estelle said she felt like she was at an 8. The thing we decided would take her to a 10 was practicing switching between our placements - making sure that Estelle felt comfortable going from one vocal extreme to the next. We decided that we will focus on this specifically for the next 2 lessons! We ran through each of our songs, going through our performance checklists for each - and then talked about the difference in feeling, mouth placement, vowel manipulation, harshness of consonants, performance techniques, and forwardness of each placement. We then had Estelle write herself a note on each of her checklists saying what she tells her brain in order to switch between them! Performance choreography: Dani California Today we also mapped out Estelle's performance choreography for her up tempo pop/rock song - Dani California! We worked on what to do with a microphone stand to keep the song rhythmic and make our body match the pace of the song! We worked on more jerky movements, feeling free to move the microphone stand around - making sure to follow our mouth and sing directly into the mic, making sure we keep our wide stance, adding heel taps for a rhythmic feel, and quick microphone pulls!