Muscle memory: Permanent smile, throwing forward: Today we worked on several things that will help Lily not only move into our forward placement, but keep her voice there comfortably. The first one is our "permanent smile". We want to make sure that Lily is pushing the sound forward through her teeth so that her voice continues to build in strength and brightness - and when we put on an obnoxious smile in all of our practices, it helps our chords build the muscle memory of how bright it needs to sound, and where the air should flow, so that when we move it to a more natural place, the sound remains the same! The second one is finishing out our words in a forward place, making sure that she doesn't pull back at the end of a word or when adding different types of style or scats on the end of phrases. The tendency is to pull back or trail off in the wrong direction, muting the end of the word, making the style harder than it needs to be, or muffling the sound by pulling it back into your throat. By making sure (with the help of forward motions with our hands) that the sound not only travels forward at the beginning of the word, but that it feels like a water fall - constantly flowing forward through each word - we can make sure Lily's voice builds the right muscles and continues to sing in the correct way as she moves into performing (and has more things to focus on). Mix voice: In our vocalization exercises, we are working on building Lily's mix voice so that her powerful range extends all the way to her highest notes! We are doing this by transitioning her belt into soft belt as it gets higher - and then moving her mix range notes forward to our "Pinnochio" voice, giving her a stronger sound.