LaeKin Burgess-MayeRee Lesson Report #4 2/20

MayeRee Lesson Report #4

We started at G4 doing chewy hums on downward 5 note scales. I want to start higher than this next time. After we did a little bit of this to loosen up her jaw and get the voice working comfortably we did primal sounds. We did a lot of hums of indecision and "what!" then discussed how easily we did these things. When we tried to return to the descending hums she immediately changed her voice again. I stopped her and asked her if she noticed the difference between her speaking and her singing, she said she did. We returned again to humming and I asked her to think specifically that she is sighing, not singing. When she would grab on the onset I would stop her and ask her if she felt something different. She got to a point she would stop herself when she felt the grab. Next we changed things up a bit and instead of humming we did the same exercise but said "what" then sung "what." When she had a released onset I stopped her and asked her how it felt differently. She said when she felt "grab" she felt it in the front of her throat and when she didn't "grab" she didn't feel anything in her throat. I thought that maybe her grabby onset had something to do with tension I saw in her neck and shoulders so I talked to her about her A-O joint. I told her to use that point as a place of balance and to let everything below that point of balance be completely relaxed. Our next vocalize, with that idea in mind, was descending arpeggios on [u]. Our aim again was for complete fall through rather than grabbing for the pitch. There was a little squeak or air coming through before the onset and I asked her if she was noticing this at all but she said no. I changed to ba-ba-bi on 1-3-5-slide down hoping the "b" would help with her onset and changing the vowel would keep her from "setting" her voice up. We again addressed having complete release in the neck and jaw while singing. I tried to get her to be sloppy with this instead of being so exact as she likes to be. We did some yawns and I told her to watch out for a big change between the [a] and [i] vowels. Basically I was trying to help her see that she was working a lot harder than she needed to be. We still have a long way to go with this but I felt like MayeRee was starting to understand the concept I was trying to explain but has not yet been able to fully apply it.