Today we started moving our forward placement to a more conversational place - taking off some of the harsh edges and moving to a more melodic sound. We first do this by extending our words - making sure to sing them how we talk them, still going through our forward placement - and then lengthening each vowel so that our words connect a little bit more. By starting from a purely "talked" place - we are creating a place in Jake's brain that's entirely new, as opposed to changing little things about his voice over time. By doing this, we are guaranteeing that Jake can feel our new placements - and know by the way it feels that he is singing in a healthy and correct way. From there, we start to build this muscle memory - while continually moving his voice into the places we need it in order to give Jake more control, brighten his sound, build his high belt, strengthen his voice and extend his range.
If the goal of our first lesson is for Jake to feel 10 on a 1-10 scale of weirdness - taking him completely out of his comfort zone so that he can feel the difference of what we're doing, this second lesson is about taking Jake's voice a step closer to feeling and sounding comfortable with it. You'll notice this week will sound more like singing - even though we haven't added any style.
It's important that we go through these steps our first few lessons so that Jake's "singing monster" or bad/unhealthy habits become something he can feel as he sings. Creating our placements from scratch allow him to differentiate between the two.
Widening vowels
This week we also started working on some high belt technique - building the highest and most powerful part of Jake's voice, making sure the whole time that he doesn't hurt his voice. In order for Jake to have a more powerful sound without increasing unhealthy pressure on his cords, or volume that could cause him to put more pressure than he needs on his vocal cords - we widen our vowels, adding an "ah" sound in the middle of our words.
We also worked on making sure that our mouth is in the shape of a triangle - with a smile on top, to make sure our vowels stay bright and not too heavy.