Jake Spjute lesson record reactions uncle Carl #2

We began with some relaxed light stretches, the same ones I do with Cameron and my other students. Hi said he hadn't really sung yet today so we started off with some light vocalizes on an "a" vowel. Descending five note scales, I feel like they are the best to begin with, we started on A3 and worked our way down to  a low G. I feel like he doesn't have a very big range, which I think is due to him being in his fifties and not training his voice on a daily basis, but I would definitely classify him as a baritone.
During the downward scales I would have to ask him to fix his chin. He tends to put his chin down toward his chest when he sings, he holds that position the whole time and it looks like it causes a lot of tension just by looking at him, so I can imagine it's causing a lot of inner tension with the voice. My cue for him to put his chin in alignment is "chin up" which probably sounds horrible to command as a voice teacher, but for him it works. I had to explain the top teeth being parallel with the floor idea to him last time at our lesson, so when I say say chin up, he actually moves his chin to a better aligned position. During these scales I also noticed his breathing seemed chesty and this seems like it triggered the chin to go down into his neck/chest again. So I explained to him about breathing with the diaphragm and not using any extra muscles that are not needed to breath. I also explained that when we recruit more muscles than needed, we usually cause a tension, which will hurt the quality of our voice.
After these scales and conversations about breathing and alignment, we took out his music for secret garden and worked on his part for the rest of the lesson. Most of the role he sings is pretty much in the middle range of his voice, so it in general isn't hard for him to sing, but I wanted him to sound as beautiful as he could. So I talked about vowel space in the mouth and how we shouldn't change the space more than we need to when we change the vowels. We talked about keeping a big open space all the time, and applying the breath technique we had discussed earlier into the phrases of his role. I demonstrated singing different vowels while trying to maintain the same space, but since I'm not the best at that, I turned to YouTube for the help of Bruce ford to demonstrate. I asked if I turned the music off, if he could tell when Bruce changed vowels, so we had a little fun with it and basically, we both couldn't tell when he changed vowels with the volume down because his vowels were so uniform. Very cool!