*** ATTENTION *** The new website is now at students.voicelessonbootcamp.com: Katie Phipps: Notice me Horton (week 1)

At our first lesson we introduce so many new things - all of which play a different part in changing/improving our voice quickly and in a big way:

Katie was so great at vocalizing! She immediately let her guard down and committed to exactly what I was telling her to do! It is in this part of our voice lessons that we do a lot of the ground work for our songs - not only warming up different parts of our range, but in building different parts of our voice through each different exercise.

Our vocalization exercises aren't about sounding good - if anything they are the one of the strangest things we do. We take our voices to extreme places that are essential to the placements we will be using in our songs while building the muscle memory necessary to sing correctly for both sound, and the health of our vocal cords.

We are going to build up Katie's voice every lesson in different ways, working on each register to extend her range and comfortability with that range, bridge the gaps between registers so that she can freely access high and low notes with ease, and build different parts of her voice so that she can further customize each song to each specific genre. Katie worked so hard and we had so much fun! It was great!

We are going to work hard at making sure that Katie keeps her voice nice and safe! As we continue working on our range extension and placement of high and low notes - we will also be working on making sure that Katie is approaching each note in the correct way so that all that awesome power is kept safe and that she is able to hit her high notes a little bit easier!

We started moving her voice into a place she's never felt before right away with our vocalizing. Even though it was strange - she was all about getting crazy with me, which I appreciated so much.

It's in our vocalization exercises that we do all the hard work. I start to move the student's voice into extreme versions of the placements we will use from here on out - it is in these exercises that we build and work towards extending their range, building stamina in their voice, and we start to build the placements from scratch, starting with singing how we talk. We make sure that our vocalizing exercises become strategic instead of a typical warm up that makes the student feel like they sound pretty while vocalizing. We use different exercises to emphasize different things.

I make all my students promise me at the beginning of their lessons that they will do all the silly ridiculous things that I ask them to do because it will make them a better singer.

You'll see this in their videos as I make them wiggle in a variety of weird ways. Some of the motions are to remind them to do very specific things (there will be a lot of forward arm movement). Some of the motions are to distract them so that they can't squeeze their vocal cords when hitting exceptionally high or low notes in their song - you can't hurt your voice, or sing incorrectly in an unsafe way, if you're rolling your head and moving your shoulders. The movement helps us accomplish what we need to - and later we take the motions out the more lessons we have and more we move into performance technique.

A new placement an interesting thing. With our first few lessons we're trying to get Katie to feel her voice in a completely different way. We do this not only for sound quality and vocal technique but also for safety of her cords. We are trying to get any ounce of pain or tightness out - and give Katie the ability to control every part of her voice 100% of the time. While we will work on building Katie's voice as well - our new placements will make sure that she doesn't hurt it as we continue to add power, brightness, style, texture, character, and clarity each week.

The first placement we introduce is singing like we talk. While the students are figuring out how this feels with their voice we break it down in ways that are easy to do. We call this "talk it out".

I remind each student in real time of the different things to focus on in their song - you will hear me talking to them throughout their after videos.

Because Katie did so awesome today - we moved through SO many things!! We started working on her musical theater placement! In order to be able to get into more complicated musical theater techniques and placements next lesson, today we mainly worked on opening up her sound, making it brighter and bigger! We did this by widening our vowels and changing our mouth placement. We widened our vowels - giving Katie's voice an even bigger sound without adding unnecessary pressure to her vocal cords - by adding "ah" to the middle of all of her words.

We further exaggerated this big sound by changing Katie's mouth placement to that of a trapezoid and then into a triangle. When she is singing her low notes, we make sure that her mouth is nice and wide - and then when we transition into her high notes, we add dropping our jaw - giving the high notes the extra power they need by moving the concentration through a larger area forward.