3. New placements: Moving your voice forward, singing brighter
4. Singing like we talk
We had our first lesson this week! Ruby was wonderful!! She is such a hard worker and such a joy to work with!!
Each week I'll break down our lessons into a few different categories:
"We vocalized on", "We worked on", our progress videos, and reminders to bring a new song at the appropriate times.
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:
Vocalizing and matching pitch:
Ruby 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 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.
Ruby has a great ear and is awesome at matching pitch! Our vocalization exercises are going to be so awesome to help bring her cute personality to each of her songs. We are going to build up Ruby'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. Ruby worked so hard and we had so much fun! It was great!
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.
Ruby really was so awesome!
Relaxing the voice while singing:
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.
New placements:
A new placement an interesting thing. With our first few lessons, we're trying to get NAME to feel her voice in a completelydifferent way. We do this not only for sound quality and vocal technique but also for the safety of her cords. We are trying to get any ounce of pain or tightness out - and give NAME the ability to control every part of her voice 100% of the time. While we will work on building NAME'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.
Now you know what to expect for our lesson breakdowns!