Today we worked on adding style and dynamics to Jake's song. Because Jake has such an awesome powerful voice, sometimes he shies away from texturizing or stylizing his songs with the softer part of his voice because it doesn't feel as powerful. Today we worked on maintaining that power - with less volume - using our "soft belt" placement. Soft belt allows Jake the power of a belt sound without the added pressure on his vocal cords. We will never take the power away in Jake's voice - if anything we are building his voice to be bigger and more powerful than ever! But, in order to do that, we are working on building a relaxed, easy, healthy and comfortable place for Jake's voice to go so that his power will never hurt his vocal cords.
The dynamics that we worked on today emphasized a couple different parts of Jake's voice and abilities by allowing him to add emotion to the song (softer, added breath to some words), brighten his song up even further (wide vowels on the bottom, adding "ah" to words), and give him a bigger sound on the top without the added unhealthy vocal pressure (widening our high belt vowels and dropping our jaw)
Getting comfortable with our forward placement
Today we also worked on taking off the rough edges of our "hit the wall" forward placement (where we are extremely talked and sound very harsh). We worked on smoothing the transitions between our words (so that it sounds seamless just as talking the song would), yet maintaining the separation of syllables for our brain to help with resetting our placement every syllable and pitch.
Jake did SO great!!! I'm so excited to do our next song!!