Mah-mah, nay-yay, be-be, yah-yah, adding everybody's favorite for Garrett's high belt
We worked on:
1. Moving to a more conversational place
2. Extending through our notes (preparing for scats and style)
3. Use of consonants
Moving more conversational/Extending through notes:
If the goal of the first week is to make my students sound as weird as possible so that they feel their voice in a 100% different place than they ever have - the goal for the second lesson is to help them see how they will use this crazy placement they're starting to get the hang of and which parts of it that we soften the edges on.
We take their words from being completely talked and in some cases staccato to a more extended place - helping them find the place that is 1. more melodic and 2. extends their forward placement to give the student more control of their voice, prepping the end of their words for scats and style that we will be adding. If the beginning of the word hits the wall and goes forward, but when the word is extended it falls back to where we started in our before video - then Garrett will never use the placement and will never reap the benefits from moving his voice forward.
We call this lesson our conversational lesson because we take the parts out of the placement that we wouldn't use in a performance or on stage slowly - while making sure the feeling, placement of mouth, head placement, and vocal chords, relaxation of the body and chords, and thought process of getting there remains.
You'll hear our song start to take shape in our after video today - no style has been added, but it starts to lose the extreme unnatural sound of singing like we talk and you can hear the change in how forward it sounds (or how it sounds more powerful, like he has better control, happier or "brighter", and more commercial or like what's on the radio.)
Use of consonants:
There are only 2 correct ways to use a consonants:
1. For stylistic purposes by emphasizing them to make a song sound harder or punchier
2. To bounce off of - to get to a vowel. Hitting the consonant quickly and then immediately going to the following vowel for a big open sound.
The way Garrett was using them before was he was lingering on them trying to use them to move the sound forward in the song (forward meaning onward, not forward by our definition). Because of this his pitch was suffering in places and he was tightening his throat even further before hitting big notes. Don't you worry though. We fixed that right up.