1. Making our forward placement more conversational
2. Widening vowels
Making our forward placement more conversational: Today we worked on moving Jay's voice to a more conversational place - taking our forward placement and making it sound and feel more natural and less extreme. We still want Jay to feel our new placement, still want him to push it forward through his teeth, brighten the sound, and feel like he's talking through it. We still want him to feel the difference between our placements and techniques and the ones that he came in with in our first lesson, but now we want our placement to feel a little bit more comfortable for him. At the same time - we are rounding off some of the rough edges Jay had to develop for maximum effectiveness, when we moved Jay's voice to our extreme "hit the wall" placement last week. By rounding off these edges - Jay starts to sound more and more like he is singing in a natural way.
We go slow like this so that Jay never has the opportunity to go backwards, it keeps him moving forward (with both him progress and with him voice).
Widening vowels
We also worked on mapping out parts of Jay's song - writing how it should sound phonetically. We put "ah" in the beginning or middle of some of the words to help widen the vowel - making the sound a little bit bigger, and giving Jay an easy way to add power without adding pressure to his chords.