Lesson Record 2.21.14
We started with showing him some
anatomy maps on a body mapping website I found. I showed him the natural
curvature of the spine, and the length of the spine. “The spine is the coat rack from which you hang the weight
of your body.” I told him that the
muscles don’t hold up the spine, but they rest on the spine. I told him that I may have given him
the wrong impression regarding the spine: it doesn’t need to be straightened
for singing, but just resting in the natural curvature. I then showed him the head, and described
where the AO joint was. Tilting
the head originates from the joint in the center of your head. I then showed him a map of the pharynx,
and specifically that there is a section of the throat that is above the mouth.
I made sure he could see himself in
the mirror, and we started with “feee ah” on a slow 54321. He was doing a decent job at keeping
the top light and letting weight enter at the last note. I noticed during this that his posture
was a bit hips forward. I got up
and showed him what I saw, and what I’d like to see. I instructed him to put his rib cage front of his hips.
Then we tried “ha” on 53421. After a couple repetitions, I asked him
to try yawning on each inhale before the exercise. I did this because I noticed that his larynx was rising as
we went higher. I told him let
yawn directly flow into singing.
The sound seemed a little less pinched when we tried this. I had to remind him to keep yawning,
because it got less exaggerated as we went on.
We then transitioned to “shoes” on a
fast 5432123454321, and I asked him to pant in between each repetition. I described the pant as the smiley
creepy pant, sort of like a dog. I
tried this because I thought the more space he needs could be accessed by going
above his mouth, instead of just always yawning, which can make the sound
heavy. I like the [u] vowel for
Philip, because his sound gets a lot more focused without any pinching. I tried jumping being a high range and
low range for him, and then asked him afterwards if he felt a difference
between the two. He said he
didn’t, but he felt that his panting was deeper when preparing for a low range
exercise, which I thought was a very interesting observation. We tried a couple more exercises
jumping up and down. His sound got
very pinched in the high range when jumping up and down. I noticed that he was looking
unconfident in what was going to come out, and so I told him that I loved that
he wasn’t sure what was going to happen before he sang, but he tried it
anyway. I don’t him not to feel
dumb if something sounds crazy, because that’s exactly what we want in voice
lessons.
I added an instruction to the same
exercise: try to yawn and pant during
each inhale. I demonstrated, and
it sounded a bit like a monkey noise, which was probably good. I changed the exercise to “fee ah” on
8531 arpeggio. He didn’t always
come in on the first note, which I note which I thought was fine, because he
wasn’t coming in when he wasn’t ready.
I stopped and told him that breathing and singing was one fluid motion
and I used the body motions that we used in Vocal Ped that made us all crack
up. Surprise yourself when you
start singing. That seemed to be successful in getting the high range to sound
not as pinched. When he didn’t do
the breath-sing as one fluid motion, it showed in the sound; it was a bit more
pinched and was out of tune.
We switched breathing thoughts to
the dropping the groceries idea, on “shot” 87654321 fast. I told him I didn’t care about smearing
the notes right now, so it turned into more a glide, which was fine for
me. There were a couple attempts
that were really free and easy, which were great, but others were a bit thinner. I further described the breath as a
downward thing, not an upward. The
grocery imagery is good for that because it’s dropping a weight, not adding a
weight.
The next exercise was “hoo” on
3212321 starting on D4. I instructed
him to remain light on everything but the bottom note. I told him this was a mini form of the
light to heavy exercise we were working on before. I told him it was like going from falsetto to speech. He had trouble with it at first, and so
I encouraged him to just experiment.
As expected, he carried the weight back up on the ascent, so I told him
make sure the two top notes felt equally light.
He got a bit frustrated and said “I
want to sound good!” I told him
that voice lessons is not about sounding good, it’s about learning.
When he realized that is was okay
to use falsetto, the exercise really started to work. I wanted to him to get even more speaky on the last note,
and then we finally got to a place where he was really contrasting the light and
the heavy. He said he was having a
hard time switching from speaky back to the falsetto, and I told him that was
exactly the point of the exercise!
That was exciting to hear.
I told him the reason that I was using this exercise is to help him
transition from that speaky range to the falsetto-y range.
He didn’t bring his music with him,
so we just continued with exercises for the whole lesson. We extended the last exercise to “hoo”
1765671, and I reminded him to keep it light at top and heavy at last note. He was still bringing a bit of weight
back up with him, and I also saw some neck tension, so I reminded him about
balancing his head from the center of his ears. I told him that his head being balanced is going to help his
sound more than he realizes. The
sound got better after that. After
a couple attempts I described to him the cartoon karaoke bouncing ball and
asked him to emulate that bounciness.
He said he felt like a mess today,
and I reassured him that voice lessons sometimes bring out the worst parts of
our voice, so he didn’t need to worry about it.
We had an interesting conversation
about how standing straight while singing felt weird to him, because he’d
gotten in a habit of leaning forward while singing. I told him that singing while standing upright is a really
difficult thing, but we’ll keep working on it.
We switched the exercise to “shee”
on 5432123454321. He caught
himself in not balancing his head properly, and I thought that was a great
self-observation. I told him that
I noticed that the more he was thinking about his singing, the more separated
he got from his body awareness. We
talked about inclusive awareness as a result of this realization. So I told him that each time we restart
the exercise in a new key, he should try to rebalance his head and body.
We kept going with the exercise,
and I told him he wasn’t allowing the bounciness of the karaoke ball in his
sound. He said that he felt he was
getting slightly darker as he went down, and I just told him that he needs to
make sure it also gets slightly lighter as you go up, which was the key he was
missing.
The next attempt after that talk
was a lot better. Each time I
reminded, he got it right.
And that was the end of the lesson!
Reaction:
I’m glad that I brought up the idea of the AO joint, because
I’m realizing that balancing his head might be a really good thing to work on,
and it helped us throughout this lesson.
I realized from Vocal Ped that “h” is probably a bad consonant to use in
exercises, which I did quite a bit during this lesson. I’ll make sure to replace that with
something else. What I really don’t
know how to do is to go from allowing his voice to switch between the two
registers, and start to mix them…. Or if he’s even ready for that!
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