Lesson Reaction
1.31.14
I still say like quite often, so I
asked him to call me out when I say “like.”
We started with laying on the floor exercise, to get posture
well established. I reminded him
of the lower back, neck and all the things we’ve discussed in the past. I reminded him about breathing in the
side ribs and in nostrils on your back.
Some small talk while we laid down, which was good to take some time in
the laying down posture. Then we
switched to laying over in a chair, asking him to feel his bottom ribs with his
hands and checking for expansion.
I described that my torso felt like a cylinder that is getting bigger
evenly from all sides. That
analogy allows the stomach to have freedom to expand as well, but not more than
any other part of the torso. We
slowly leaned up, and then stood up against the wall (getting our shoulders,
elbows, and wrists aligned.) I
described to him that when I did the cylinder breathing while against the wall,
I felt my spine pushing against the wall with each inhale. He didn’t really feel it, and he said
that when he transferred to standing up he had a hard time feeling his sides
still expanding. He felt that he
had nowhere to go, and so I asked him to try pushing his spine against the wall
in each inhale. I told him that if
I let my body go, it would push itself against the wall. I then reiterated that he didn’t have
to stop his stomach from expanding, but just make other parts equal to it. We didn’t really solve everything right
now, but I told him that it’s just a learning process.
We started with his
favorite, “bap bap bap bap bap baaaaa” on 54321 5 slide to 1. I started with this because it was my
first idea to assist Philip in his hypo-adduction problem. His tone was clearly breathy in the
high range, but got less so in the lower range. I asked him to change his vowel to be a true [a] that is
fully formed, not clipped. He
followed that instruction well, and I think it made a slight improvement in his
breathiness. But still around
middle C, his timbre changed from breathy in the high to clear in the low. This made me suspect that he actually
wasn’t hypo-adducted, but something else relate to register shift. At this point, I asked him to watch
himself in the mirror, noting his torso when he took a breath. He noticed that his stomach was moving
and that his chest was rising for each breath. I was particularly concerned after the chest rose, it
immediately collapsed. I pointed
that out to him, and explained that I didn’t want collapse at the beginning of
each phrase. That instruction
helped his tone be quite a bit less breathy. I asked him to describe what he felt, and said that he was
focusing making sure the chest didn’t rise or fall for breathing or singing. I thought that was a good thought and I
also pointed out that the belly button goes in instead of chest collapsing. We continued the same exercise, and I
eventually switched to “beep beep beep beep beep.” That sounded a lot less breathy than “bap.” Then changed to [bop] then
[bup]. It seemed that beep was
most successful.
He
was coughing, and I asked about it.
I told him about the coughing advice the voice health specialists from
Salt Lake told us, and he said he’d try it out.
The
next exercise we tried was “never never no” on a 54321 downward scale. This was an attempt to decrease the
breathiness. He was very gentle
with it at first, and so I asked him to sing with the feeling the words gave,
which I thought was anger. He was
a bit confused on how to do this with pitch. I sang it for him how I would do it, and I told him to put
his anger into the “n” consonants, but still sing. I asked him to imagine a situation where he would say never
never no (My example would be if someone was trying to get him to do something
he considered immoral.) We
continued on F major and going down, and in listening back, it sounds like I
was just having him carry his speaking voice up in order to get rid of
breathiness. I don’t want him to
do that. I asked him to compare
what he sounded like before getting mad and after getting mad, and he noticed
the difference in clarity. I sang
an example of what I thought he sounded like before and after the anger
instruction.
We
then went back up to E major, and did the same exercise on “naaaaa ni” As we got to F major and higher, it
started to get back into breathy land, because he couldn’t carry his speaking
voice up any higher. Gosh, I was
totally just teaching belt, and I had no idea. Dang it.
Then
we tried a smear from 5 to 1 on an annoying “naaaaah” syllable. Really whiney sounding. This was again bringing his chest voice
too high.
* I liked one thing I said while we
were doing this: “I don’t care how you sound. Everything you are doing is giving me information to help
you.”
He started to crack from head voice to chest voice as he was
smearing down, especially in A major.
I told him to not to worry about the crack, and he asked, “you want the
crack to happen?!” I told him to
allow his voice to do whatever it was gonna do. I hope that was a good answer to that question. It seemed to be cracking around D above
middle C.
Then
we switched to doing music at this point.
He brought a piece that I didn’t recognize with him, and I tried to fake
play while he sang, but I failed at that pretty bad. We had trouble getting on the same page with tempo, and I
had a hard time hearing him while playing. He had forgotten a lot more than he thought he had, so we
scaled back to singing it just on “na” for each syllable. I just stopped playing at a certain
point, and asked him to sing acapella.
After he sang the first page, I asked him to try singing the page on
“bap” all staccato, because we had done that earlier in our warm up. He was clipping the vowel a lot, it
sounded more like “bup.”
I
told him at the end of the lesson that I was hearing breathiness in his tone,
but I didn’t know what to do. So I
ended the lesson……
Lesson Reaction:
I very preoccupied by his breathiness in the high range,
which clouded my vision to a whole host of other things I probably could have
seen. I now know that I really
should be watching out for tension and constriction rather than worrying about
breathiness.
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