Today we worked on our musical theater character placement - and making a song sound like it's on broadway and in the context of a musical. The way that we did this, was by focusing on the dynamics of the song and the acting element we needed to add to it.
We worked on moving Jake's voice to a place that could build from a purely talked monologue sound - to a big open musical theater belt sound for the hook of the song ("History has it's eyes on you"). For the big belt-y part of the song, we worked on widening our vowels to make the sound even bigger and more open.
We worked on talking the beginning like the character would - simplifying it as much as we could in order to pull the CHARACTER aspect of the song into our sound. This is the extra step we take to take our song from sounding like karaoke - to sounding like Jake's on a stage or singing the song in the actual musical.
He did SO AWESOME!!
Simplifying - pop style
The second thing we worked on "Thousand years" - and simplifying it as much as possible. In order to do this, I told Jake to not try and make it sound GOOD or like SINGING - but instead - to try and make it sound as much like talking and almost stupidly simple as he could.. just as an experiment.
He did - absolutely crushed it - and then listened to the result. It was AWESOME and sounded very pop! We are working on connecting these weird "this is what it feels like" moments to the actual sound in our brain so that we can prepare before we go on stage by remembering - "make it FEEL this way .. and it will SOUND this way!"
Jake did so awesome today!!
Here are our videos from today!
Before/End of our lesson:
History has it's eyes:
Thousand years:
Great job Jake!!! You're killing it!! See you soon!