-
Tonality Fixes (Singing Teachers)
Oh my gosh! I didn’t see this reply. Thank you so much Kat <3
I do do a lot of Italian vowel work with her – and she is a very smiley individual haha 🙂 So we work a lot with yawny, relaxed facial expressions in warm-ups to try and stretch out any tightness that she may be creating in her every day life.
She used to be very quiet and sigh-y but I’ve managed to get her singing at a varied dynamic range which is brilliant. Her posture and breath control are also really strong now and pitch wise, she’s always on the money! It’s just her tone that I worry about.
I have thought about inspiring her with a few lower tone voiced singers like Des’ree, Lorraine Ellison and Anna Calvi. Have you found this to be a useful tool in the past?
You super star, thank you as always x
-
2 Replies
-
Hey dudes!
So I have a student who wishes to sing at her daughters wedding. I have been teaching her once a month for 8 months and now we have up-ed her lessons to fortnightly.
She has made fantastic improvement but still has a very squeaky singing voice. As the sound is incredibly similar to her speaking voice and she is feeling no pain/strain, I’m not too worried that her larynx is sitting too high or out of it’s comfort zone naturally. However, I was wondering whether anyone has any useful tricks and tips to help encourage a more rounded, slightly deeper resonant sound.
I’d say her speaking voice is very similar to this little character from the movie Bugsy Malone…maybe not as child-like as she is a 50 year old woman but very similar.
All the best and thanks in advance🙂
-
Haha what a great youtube clip!
Helping a singer with their tone is a difficult one, especially if their tone is following their speaking voice; you don’t want to deviate too much from this and make singing feel like something that’s unnatural and divorced from the rest of their voice.
The only ideas I have are these:
1. Take a look at her vowels, and maybe do some work sustaining the 5 italian vowels, helping her to understand the difference between lighter and darker vowel pronunciations (ie. is the vowel shape closer to ee or oh? Is she tending towards a smile shape?)
2. Make sure her whole range is being worked. Sometimes a high larynx is made worse when someone feels as though they’re at the top of their chest and are hitting a wall. Plenty of hooty head voice work might alleviate this.
3. Work with her at a variety of volumes. Does she seem to be stuck at one volume all the time? Either very quiet or very loud? Sometimes working through different volumes can help the voice kind of break out of its mould if that makes any sense.Let me know how you’re going with the student and if any of this helps :).