Luke Shepherd Voice Lesson Summary

We began by singing scales on trills with a focus on making a long, connected legato line. Another exercise was focused on dumping the voice on the bottom of the scale a letting the voice 'float' up the rest of the octave in order to let the rest the pitches 'suspend' off the dump moment. The other purpose of the exercise was to focus on flexing and releasing a particular muscle. We spent a good amount of time doing arpeggiations on "ah-yee-ah-yee" and focusing on having a relaxed, open mouth and jaw space and accessing the space towards the back of the head and getting the sound away from a nasal quality. My natural posture is kind of closed and small and it restricts the 'openness' and freedom I need. My shoulder blades tend to rest forward and I need to try to keep them open and aligned with my spine. We spent a good amount of time doing slow, ascending scales on an 'E' vowel. The point was to focus on how each note opens up in it's own shape and vibrates in own way. Each note spins in it's own place. The goal is to make each note vibrate and spin as well as the notes that I like the best and to find a continuity of vibrating and spinning notes throughout my range. I'll be working on that a lot this week...

We worked on ways that I should be practicing my repertoire this week. Exhaling on an 'sh' sound and going through the song to focus on how the breath needs to shape each phrase BEFORE adding notes (nonetheless words and vowels and consonants). The other is to to lip buzz through each phrase with that same focus on how the breath needs to shape each phrase and how the breath shouldn't 'clip' the ends of phrases. Of course I'll be speaking the text on the side and focusing on sounding as 'Italian' as possible on my Italian pieces. Practicing the same song in a bunch of different ways is something I haven't been very good at in the past but something I took out of this lesson that I need to do to make my practice more effective and my understanding of my repertoire more complete.