Sam Meredith Lesson Summary 10/17

I think I was well prepared for my lesson today. I had been working really hard in practice trying to improve in the areas that we worked on in my lesson last week. We really only did one vocalize today, but it proved to be very effective. I sang the syllables neem, name, nahm, nohm, noom on a single pitch in the middle part of my range. First I sang the vocalize with my nose plugged. This made it so only the vowels when I opened my mouth could be heard, but it was a good way to test how much release was in my voice. When I first started singing it I felt vibration in my nostrils. I tried to fix it just by opening my mouth more, but Cindy told me that I don't need to change anything in the shape of my mouth necessarily--I just need to visualize and mentally prepare myself in order to have more release in the sound. When I tried that I was able to find that released feeling without the awkward mouth shape that led to the deterioration of the vowel. Next we tried the vocalize without my nose plugged, starting on a hum before transitioning to the vowel. It was pretty hard for me at first to keep the pitch of the hum consistent with the pitch of the vowel. A lot of times the hum was a little under pitch and by the end of the vocalize it was a fight to keep the vowel on pitch as well. I just really had to concentrate and be aware of my sound in order to keep the hum consistent with the vowel. This vocalize proved to be important when we started working on repertoire. We started by working on 'wohl denk ich oft.' When I started singing, Cindy noticed that my consonants leading to vowels were a little bit under pitch. To be honest this was a problem that I didn't really know I had so I'm really glad we worked on this today. It sounded a lot better when I concentrated on keeping the consonant consistent with with the vowel and on finding more release in the vowel by simply keeping the jaw loose rather than by forcing the mouth open. I want to work more on that this next week by going through the text in all of my songs and finding places where I could potentially have problems in this area. Then, my plan is to slow down these difficult consonant/vowel transitions to make sure they are smooth and in tune. Later on in the song we noticed that I was a little tight when I was in the upper part of my range. To fight this Cindy had me raise my arms to keep my shoulders from tightening. I also opened my mouth wide and curled my tongue to the front of my mouth. This made is so my tongue and jaw weren't too engaged when I was trying to sing. My neck was still a little tight at times, but even still without the tightness in my shoulders and without my tongue and jaw too involved in the sound the tone was much freer and it was a lot easier to sing in the upper part of my range. My goal for this next week is to find some ways that I can make that happen in the practice room and then be very aware of how that feels in my body so I can try to recreate it when I actually sing. Next we worked a little bit on sleep. We noticed that there were some areas where I had trouble finding my pitch against the accompaniment. Surprisingly, this was often at times when the pitch i was supposed to be singing was in consonance with the accompaniment, I just had some trouble hearing that. I think it was a result of me just not being familiar with the accompaniment. So my goal for this week is to learn my music more vertically, meaning that I'm going to look at every pitch I sing at analyze whether I'm singing a pitch consonant or dissonant to the piano accompaniment. I also need to have a meeting with Lizzie so I can make recordings of all the accompaniments to my songs.