Today we continued our work on our musical theater character placement. We worked hard on mapping out our character choices - and using our actions and voice inflections to build our song in appropriate ways and places. We worked on getting the most character in both our actions AND our voice to get it ready for the theatrical stage!
We also worked on our forward placement - making sure to brighten up Katie's voice and give her high notes a bigger and more powerful feel with our wide vowels, without having to add pressure to her vocal cords!
Range Extension
In our vocalization exercises, we are working hard to extend Katie's range - both low and high, while making sure to work hard on relaxing her voice to prevent her from hurting her vocal cords. Because naturally everyone has stronger registers of their voice and weaker registers of their voice - we work on building each register individually with perfecting our placements and pronunciation in our vocalization exercises to build the different parts of our voice that we use while singing that vary in pressure and tone - we do this by singing different vowels at different degrees of our forward placement and repeating the parts of our range we particularly want to work on over and over. Because Katie already has such an awesome range - we want to make sure that her cords are as healthy as possible, that her high notes are easily accessible and that she can transition between any register with a completely relaxed throat and vocal cords. We then work on the transitions between each register where the amount of pressure on our cords needs to change (or the places our voice can crack between our chest voice and our mix voice - and our mix and our head voice). We do this by approaching each of these transitions with extra caution, lightening up the pressure and volume of our voice BEFORE we get to the point we need to, and then work on building that lighter/relaxed place into a strong sound that transitions well into a higher place where volume and pressure are less (for example - we add our “Pinnochio” placement into our chest or belt range before we get to the place where we need to switch into our mix voice so as not to hurt our voice. By adding this placement early - we can build to a soft belt place rather than try and pull our chest voice up and in turn, straining our vocal cords.)
As we work to extend Katie’s range - we are making sure to do it in a healthy, safe way for their vocal cords. We do this by adding lots of movement in our head, neck, and body, and monitoring the amount of pressure they are putting on their cords at all times.
We are working on this range extension so that Katie can sing any song, any genre, any voice part - and use any part of her vocal range that each specific performance calls for. Katie has such an impressive range - we want to make sure that she can not only maintain that, but that all parts of it sound and feel safe, easy, and tension free!