- Amanda is about my age, (18/19), female, and has a decent amount of singing experience. Although she has never had any formal training, she says she is decently comfortable with singing on stage and in front of an audience. She knows how to read music.
- Throughout the first lesson, I noticed that she does have some postural issues; she tends to slouch/shrug her shoulders, and there isn’t much “core” support (unless I remind her to stand taller). Her neck and shoulders are quite stiff, and there’s some craning of the neck when she’s singing. Her breathing is slightly gaspy, and she has a tendency to restrict her airflow; her head voice is breathy and sounds very tight and “controlled.”
- Her tone quality has more loft than twang, and anything above a G above middle C has a breathy quality (when she moves into her head voice). It’s very forced sounding, and that goes hand in hand with the tension I see in her body even when we were doing warm ups. There is hardly any vibrato, but her intonation is good.
- We didn’t get to much performing in this first lesson, but from what I could gather, Amanda may be a little robotic in her singing when she’s told exactly what to sing. It could be that she was just nervous with her first voice lesson; she’s quite outgoing, so maybe this bleeds into her performance, and I just haven’t seen it yet. Stylistically, she told me she prefers to sing mild country music with her guitar (she likes music by Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, and Zooey Deschanel).
- Goals: When I asked Amanda what she hoped to accomplish in her lessons with me, she told me that she would like to extend her range and reach her higher notes with greater ease. She also said that she would like to become more “well-rounded” as a singer—she’s used to singing with another person, and she would like to become a little more independent and confident as a solo singer as far as her overall technique went.
- I started out by having Amanda sing “Happy Birthday,” starting on C4. Her tone was breathy and her throat seemed constricted. Her posture was slouched, but I’m thinking it was because she felt slightly awkward. Her intonation was very good, and she can maintain a tune independent of the keyboard.
- Immediately afterward, I decided to walk her through a warm up routine, focusing mainly on her posture and releasing the tension in her neck. Starting on G4, I had her do some loose lip trills, going down the scale in 5th intervals, just allowing the voice to glide down the scale, not paying any particular attention to the pitches in between the top and bottom notes. As we did these trills, she struggled initially with maintaining the “trill” part of the exercise, so I told her to just release the air as if she were sighing. She was holding on to the air as if in preparation for a long phrase, but I reminded her to just let the air flow. We jumped around the keyboard, and the lowest note she sang for these exercises was a G3, and the highest was a D5.
- We then moved on to sing the same notes/scales singing on “yawn.” We still weren’t worried about the pitches in between; we just wanted the first and last pitches. I didn’t want her to worry about how it sounded, but just stay relaxed. I told her to make her “yawns” as legitimate as possible to get her to relax the tension in her neck, and I told her to let her neck feel loose, and almost lolling to the side. She still struggled with this, however, because she would occasionally revert to the stiff-necks. I had her add some loose chewing motions at the end of the yawns after a bit, and this seemed to help get her into a more relaxed state.
- Staying in the same range still (I didn’t want to introduce any part of her range that would add to the tension she already had), I had her sing “thee” going down the scale. Here, I allowed her to pay more attention to the tones going down the scale, becoming more exact as her voice warmed up. However, I told her it was okay to have a “swoopy” quality to the pitches as she went down to help encourage her to be less tense. I told her to keep the previous “yawn” sensation in this exercise and let it carry over.
- As we started to bridge over the areas between the head and chest voices (around F4-A4), I helped her to identify what the difference was between the two so I could refer to it in the future. I had her read a random excerpt of text in a “Julia Child” voice and told her to read it in her normal voice to help her identify the two different voices. Because she has such a hard time maintaing control in her head voice, I told her to—as part of her warm up routine—read a paragraph or two of random text in her “Julia Child voice,” and keep the sensation of the yawn as she did so. I liked the swoopy quality she had to her speech, and it seemed a lot more relaxed when she read things like that (and it added more focus to her breathy head voice).
- After she was nice and warmed up, I had her sing a five tone scale going down (starting on E4) on “la la la la la” so I could see what her range was. We went up, and until around C5, the tension I saw in her voice from the beginning had loosened up noticeably. We eventually got to an F5 before stopping. I noticed that her transition from head to chest voice during this “test” was actually quite good; there wasn’t a noticeable break, but when compared directly to each other, her head voice is much breathier than her chest voice.
- (After I told her that she was doing very well, she said she surprised herself because she usually can’t sing that high. This was very encouraging for me to hear personally.)
- I told her to spend at least 15 minutes warming up, making sure to maintain good posture and keep the relaxed neck and shoulders position. We picked out a song for her (“Gravity” written by Sarah Barielles) for her to look at for next week. I didn’t give her the whole song because I wanted her to just focus on getting familiar with the piece before practicing bad habits.
- At the time, the lip trills seemed like a good idea, but upon going over the recording, I feel like keeping her mouth closed so she can make the trills with her lips wasn’t such a good idea. I could still hear the constriction, so I don’t think I’m going to use that again next time.
- The yawn thing seemed to work really well with her; it engaged her breath more and it got her to (eventually) relax the unnecessary tension I could see in her shoulders and neck.
- I’m going to make it a point to spend at least ten minutes of the lesson warming her up; it seems to work very well with her, and I like the “released” state she gets into when we’ve worked at it for a while.
- I also noticed that she has a lot of nervous laughter throughout the lesson; she’s still uncomfortable with the vocal exercises (because doing them in front of people as a beginner is awkward).
- There’s so much to keep track of as a voice teacher—holy cow. I feel like I picked out some decently helpful vocalizes to help Amanda, but I also felt very limited in the variety of exercises I could think of. It’s hard to be inventive on the spot. I noticed that I would find something we needed to work on, but then I’d forget to pay attention to everything else, so I felt like the lesson got a little disjointed at times. I also have a tendency to trip over my words when I’m trying to describe things. I guess it just takes practice.
To Cindy: The “Julia Child” thing seemed to be a good way to help add more of a focused sound to her head voice without Amanda straining herself. Is this okay? What other ways can I help her de-constrict her throat? I’m sort of worried that I’m going to have her do something before she’s even ready.
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