This was my sixth lesson with Rob. I started by asking how his voice felt. He said that it felt good. I asked him if he had done any singing that day. He said no. I then asked how the rest of his body felt. He said it felt good. We started by letting our necks fall gently onto our chests and then moving them gently from side to side. When we were done with that I directed him to bring his neck up one vertebra at a time until his neck came into a balanced position. Then we chewed gently to loosen up our jaws. After that I asked him to place his hand on his chin and try to gently manipulate his jaw. I told him to continue to do it until he felt like his jaw was loose. Next, we did a series of toaster stretches. After that I asked him how those stretches made his body feel. He said that it felt good. We started off vocalization by doing a bounce and float exercise using a 5 tone scale (543212345432123454321) and the words 'bay' and 'day.' We started on a scale in G (G3 being the bottom note). I asked him to start with a lighter, falsetto-like tone and then bounce off the bottom note of the scale by singing it in full voice and transitioning immediately back into head voice. I demonstrated the exercise first. Then, Rob tried it. He did the pattern once, but he was articulating a new word with each new note. I moved down a half step and demonstrated the exercise again. I asked him if it made more sense after I demonstrated. He said that it did. He tried the exercise again, but still struggled. So before I had him sing the scale on the next half step down, I reiterated that I wanted scale degrees 5-2 to be in a more falsetto-like register and scale degree one to be in a more full register. I asked him if it would be helpful if we decreased the number of scales to two and paused briefly at the bottom and top of each scale to help him keep everything straight in his mind. He said yes. So, we changed the exercise and I had him start again on D4 (top note of the scale). He again had trouble understanding the vocalize. He apologized afterward that he was having such difficulty. I told him that there was nothing to worry about. We repeated the exercise on that note. We moved down in half steps and did two more repetitions after that. I noticed that he was still having some trouble making the transition between registers. In some cases he would never leave the falsetto register and in other cases he would never go back to falsetto. After his last rep I told him that we were now going to try a different vocalize. It was a descending arpeggio on [hu] with scale degrees 8, 5, and 3 being in falsetto and the voice then using a [w] to transfer to full voiced [a] on scale degree 1. I demonstrated the exercise. We started on G4 (top note of arpeggio). I moved down in half steps. When he got to E I asked if he could exaggerate the [w] more. A couple of repetitions later I repeated my instruction to keep it nice and light in the beginning of the arpeggio because I noticed some laryngeal elevation and some neck tension. once he got down to C I moved back up and made Bb4 the top note of the exercise. From there I continued to move down in half steps until we arrived at F#, which was the site of our last repetition. After that I asked him how that vocalize felt. He said it felt good. I asked him if he felt that the transition to full voice was much easier when he made the [w] of the exercise more exaggerated. He said that he could feel the difference. I told him that I liked that a lot better than what he was doing before because I think that before he was trying to control the transition from falsetto to full voice with his neck muscles and by elevating his larynx. I told him that thinking of exaggerating the [w] was better because it allowed him to give the sound more energy without adding in unnecessary muscle activity. After that we started looking at some music. Before we went on I asked him if he had any questions. He asked me a question about intonation. He said that he feels that he is always just slightly off pitch when he first starts singing a note and that he then has to make an adjustment so that he is in tune. He was wondering why that was the case. I played him a note on the piano and just asked him to match the pitch. He did so without any trouble. I told him that since he is able to think and match a pitch he obviously isn't 'tone deaf.' I told him that the answer is probably an anatomical one and that sometimes tension in our muscles can make our intonation struggle. I tole him that I sometimes have intonation problems not because I can't hear and match pitches, but because I have excess tension in the root of my tongue, which drives the pitch down. He said that this explanation made him feel a lot better. I told him that it's a fairly normal problem to have and that a lot of singers have trouble with intonation as a result of tongue tension or something similar to it. I thanked him for bring that up and asking me that question. Then, we started working on his song 'simple gifts.' I asked him to sit on the piano bench with me to sing. I told him that I just wanted to have him sing through the first verse and then stop so that we could analyze what things we liked and didn't like. I started playing through the melody. After about a measure, he asked if I could just play through the verse once on the piano just so he could get it in his ear since he hadn't really sung through the song yet. I played through the melody of the first verse once. I asked him if he was more clear on the melody after that. He said that he was. We went through the verse again. To his credit, he did do a lot better after hearing the melody once. After we finished I asked how that felt. He said that it was a little shaky and that he felt like he was doing all the things that he isn't supposed to do to reach high notes. I told him that I did notice he was doing that. I asked him then if there was something that he felt he did really well on. He said that he felt like the notes were pretty solid even though he was concentrating on the words as well as the notes. After that I told him that this next time we were just going to take out the words. I told him that we were going to sing the song on a nice, easy word: 'blah.' I told him that the stupider the word feels, the better because I wasn't going to be concerned with how it actually sounded--I just wanted it to feel easy. We again went through the first couple of phrases this time on 'blah.' Between phrases I asked him for a stupider feeling in the jaw. As we went through the second phrase I noticed that he was having trouble with the pitches again. So, after that I asked him to listen as I played the melody at that part. I asked him if he found that it was easier to sing the melody on 'blah.' He said that it felt less tense than it did before. I told him that the more he will give over to the sense of not caring what it sounds like and just let his voice be what it wants to be, the better his singing will feel. After that we moved onto another phrase. I played it through once so that he could hear what it sounded like. I asked him after that if he could just pantomime through that phrase as I played through it on the piano. After I played through it I asked if it made more sense to him. He said that there were just some places where he was having trouble remembering the rhythm. I told him that I just really wanted him to sing without tension, so I asked him if he could just mimmc the contour of the melody with his voice in a comfortable range. I told him that I didn't care if it sounded really out of tune or if the rhythms weren't completely right, I just wanted it to feel easy for him. We tried it again and he just ended up singing it the octave lower. He then apologized, saying that it was just very hard for him to sing off key. Before we tried singing again I asked him what kind of a sound he would make if he were in the ice cream store and couldn't decide what flavor he should get. He made a humming noise. The noise he made, however, was on a pretty low pitch, so I demonstrated a higher pitched version of the same hum and asked him if he could have that kind of tone in mind when he sings the next time. We did it again, but this time he was staying on the right pitch. He apologized again saying that it's just hard for him because he never wanted to live with the embarrassment of singing off key throughout his upbringing. I told him that it's good that he doesn't want to sing out of key, but that I just wanted him to not care about sound and only care about feeling. I also told him that I understand his quandary because it's certainly not every day that a music teacher comes along and tells you that they don't want you to produce the right pitches. We tried the phrase one more time. During his singing I told him to 'be wrong.' After we made it through the phrase I asked him if he liked the feeling of that phrase better than previous ones even though it didn't sound as good. He said that it was difficult to concentrate on not singing the right notes, but that he didn't feel as tense that time. After that we went on, but this time I asked him to just bend forward slightly at his hips, keeping his neck in a balanced position, and resting his elbows on his legs. I gave him the book so that he could still read the music while he sat there. After attempting to find the right position, I asked him if he could bend more at his hips and less at his back. After that he got right in to the position that I wanted him in. We sang through the phrase again, this time singing the notes on the page. I asked him, however, to continue to concentrate on not caring how his singing actually sounds. When he sang it was in the lower octave. I asked him after we finished the phrase if he could sing it in the right octave the next time. He said that he could. I told him before we sang again that I would love it if he could maintain the same feeling of ease that he had singing the octave lower. We sang it again, this time in the right octave. I reminded him to have a stupid feeling jaw as he was singing. I asked him then what he thought about it. He said that it felt a lot better. I asked him what he thought contributed to that. He said that he felt like he did a better job having a loose jaw and that he did a better job not worrying about the high notes. I told him that I felt that those were probably the two biggest factors in his improvement. I went on to say that it can be hard when we first start singing because we want so desperately to sound good, but really we just need to let the voice be what it wants to be because when we do it feels a lot better and much of the time ends up sounding better anyway. I thanked him for being so willing to do things that didn't necessarily sound good. I asked him before we adjourned if he had any questions. He replied that he didn't.
I think I made a lot of mistakes in this lesson, but I think I responded fairly well to them. Rob was really having trouble understanding the first vocalize that I had planned for him. I think I did a good job adjusting and finding one that worked for him, but I still think I could have maybe moved on sooner. How many times should I let a student try and fail at a vocalize before I quit just trying to explain it better and just change it? I also think that he wasn't really responding very well to a lot of the strategies I had to help his singing. For example, I think that the 'blah, blah, blah' exercise wasn't really working for him at the beginning. I think that it could be an effective exercise for him, but in the beginning he just didn't seem very willing to buy into the whole 'stupid' concept. I feel like it improved once we had our discussion about not worrying so much about what we sound like when we practice, but I think he still can find greater release in his jaw. I do think that the alternate posture was effective for him. It seemed to loosen up the sound a good amount. I do, however, wish that I had pursued that earlier. Another thing that I learned from this lesson is the importance of setting clear practice expectations. I don't think Rob had really looked at his song at all since our last lesson. I think that's pretty much all my fault, because I have never told him how much I expect him to practice or that I expect him to practice at all on his own. That will definitely be something that I will want to do going forward as I establish my own vocal studio.
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