Membership Expired Kat Hunter
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this sounds awesome. I’d love to hear some conversation about why/when to teach breathing. With only a few exceptions I tend to not teach breathing at all!
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Hey Eliza,
I’ve heard some mixed reviews about old Roger Love. What’s his teaching method? Anything in particular you took away from his book?
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3 choices I can recommend:
Voice: Psyche and Soma – Cornelius Reid
The Naked Voice – Stephen Smith
Your Body, Your Voice – Theodore DimonHappy holidays indeed:)
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Didn’t know old Miller was out-there! haha. I’ve read the Miller and Kayes, I’ll check out the others!
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Righteo!
Number one, is that I find students who squeeze alot and do things that make their voice sound weird unnecessarily are usually just trying really hard. Ironically it’s often these singers for whom music means so much to them that they’d prefer to micromanage everything to avoid anything going “wrong” but end up sounding completely unnatural.
There’s a few things I’d do for this particular student. Number 1 is get her speaking everything (including the lyrics to the song and all her exercise sounds that you’re using). Listen to her speaking voice and see what’s going on in there. Is it breathy? Is it high? Is it released? If there’s any pathology in her speaking voice she’ll probably over compensate with singing, so make sure she’s speaking with power and ease first! Get things back to basics. If her speaking voice sounds great then get her to be aware that for the most part, (especially down low where these songs are), singing is basically just speaking but with more sustain and greater specificity of intonation. But everything should feel pretty similar, pretty free. Her speaking voice can be a template for finding something that’s much more comfortable and natural for her.
Another thing I note in these recordings is that she has quite a high voice. This is causing her to go way too muscly at the bottom (which probably feels a little extreme for her), and is consequently forcing a little break to happen at E4 pretty consistently. This tells me that even though chest voice is something you need to work on with her in the long term, it’s probably her trying to sound strong at this low extreme of her voice with no reference frame that’s causing tension. She’s a high voice, so let the voice chill out nice and high for a while. Allow her to be a bit heady. Do some songs that have lines that start above that E (even songs that start above A4!) with descending melodic lines. This will appear to weaken the sound of the voice in the short term, but it will also trick her into stopping her voice from muscling her way up from the bottom, which in the long term will result in a more natural strength-building process. Dopey or sob sounds from the bottom will only make that break at E4 more pronounced, which will make her use more muscle to compensate! Do songs that aren’t quite so heavy sounding. Let the voice return to normal before you add more muscle! That would be my 2 cents :).
