Personal Improvement - Commit To Change

If you're doing a vocalise for a single reason, you're wasting your time. Find 3. Here's a cheat's list: posture, breathing, phonation, resonance, articulation, intonation/tuning, vowel shapes, chord synchronisation... you get the idea!

To practice at home and get results:

1. Practice in front of the mirror to correct:

• Postural Faults / Tension in face or body
  
• Expressive communication - body and face
• Mouth shape
• Choreography
  

2. Tape yourself to hear:

• Vowel-to-vowel delivery of consonants
  
• Clear and bright, short vowels, forward and resonated, locked and rung
  
• Dynamic plan & vocal gems
  
• Lyric delivery - all parts sing as melody
  
• Lifted, relaxed, resonant, forward tone throughout range and dynamics
  

3. If you're singing for half a page without stopping, you're not learning anything. Expect to sing a phrase or set of phrases 5-10 times to get it to a higher level before proceeding. EVERYONE has SOMETHING they can improve on.

Speaking as a singer who is always striving to improve, every note and word I sing is on purpose. I'm putting placement, dynamic, character, emotion, tuning and more into every note, every phrase, while striving to achieve an effortless sound. Practice just lets you do it without hard thinking!

Want to stay in pitch?

Make sure that as you transition through the vocal line, each successive vowel is LIFTED into the vowel space under your hard palette, not allowed to fall into the jaw.

To feel the difference, try singing (on one note) "we are" and notice the way it feels to LIFT out of the EE to a bright AH (for "are"). Now go EE and let the AH (for "are") fall into the jaw space. Doesn't sound that bad, but you'll lose pitch with that approach, and ring fewer chords with the 'darker' vowel sound. Can you hear and feel that the 'dropped' vowel has had the top resonators chopped out of it?

Growth Mindset

Just read a great article on how different mindsets affect achievement. The Growth Mindset is one where intelligence and 'talent' are recognized as requiring a lot of effort and hard work to bring to fruition. A Fixed Mindset believes that ability is innate and if you don't have a talent for something, there's no point in trying, resulting in the avoidance of that skillset, or making the individual feel disillusioned by lack of success, rather than spurred on to greater effort as happens with a Growth Mindset.

You can read the article at Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids&print=true

When I read it, I immediately recognized that this theory applies to singers as well. So many, many times I've been told by people that they're not good singers, or that it's all right for me, because I'm talented so singing is easy for me... What a bunch of crap! It's when people truly believe that they will never sound good that improvement is impossible. Every time I make a learning tape or learn a song, I am aware of deficiencies in my performance and strive to correct them. When you watch me singing, I'm feeling each note and tuning it, caressing it, lifting it... a lot of practice has made it 'easy', so don't belittle the achievement by telling me it's just talent!

Just recently several people have, quite separately, told me they hate to listen to their voice (on recordings) because they hear all the deficiencies and failings in it. This indicates to me a Fixed Mindset - you don't want to hear your deficiencies as you believe you can't correct them. It's also a major problem with vocal freedom and truly giving yourself to the music as your vocal self-image is something you hate. It sounds a bit naff to say 'learn to love your own voice' but your singing confidence and ability will definitely improve if you can get over that aversion.

Dale Syverson has a vocal lesson every week. Luciano Pavarotti had a voice teacher and lessons all his adult life. You think they're not talented? Effort is rewarded in this artform. 'Talent' is really just good technique, and the only gift some people have is starting out with better natural technique, or fewer problems!

So tape yourself singing a song you love. Listen to it, to the sound of your voice. To start with, don't get hung up on technical faults you hear, but listen to the vocal character - what makes it sound like you. Listen to it and listen to it (you may want to do more than one song!) for weeks and months and slowly you'll get used to that voice. If a technical flaw is bugging you, work on fixing it, record a corrected version of the song, and enjoy hearing the improvement! As you continue this process, you'll not only lose the 'hate' for your voice, but will start to feel proud of your voice, proud of each correction you make. You'll start to feel great satisfaction, knowing what you are achieving, and this will only spur you on to greater improvement. Practicing in front of a mirror is a great way to eliminate bad vocal habits by the way: you can see posture problems and see when your mouth isn't the right shape or moves on a target vowel. It's another thing people hate doing, because they don't like to look at themselves - yet not looking isn't going to solve the problem!

So don't hide away from your voice - that's defeatist and Fixed Mindset and will never allow you to grow beyond your current abilities.

Building Unit Sound

Here’s one way of looking at Unit Sound.



Listening Skills provide the foundation to all good ensemble singing. You need good ears to hear and adjust to the others in the group, but you’ll find that as you get better and better, your ears will also improve, so you can hear smaller and smaller decrements of difference and work at eliminating them.

Instant, Accurate Pitch is required to produce vertically aligned chords. It’s pretty hard to think about unity if the sound is muddy from chord to chord, or plain out of tune!

Blend is the bit that most people think of for unit sound, not surprisingly! We’re looking for similar vocal production skills and the same ideal sound, but also the harmony parts need to listen to the natural strengths and characteristics of the Lead’s voice and try to sing with a similar character – enough to make the blend great and the sound clean.

Instant, Matching Vowels will make a huge difference to blend, among other things, and working on vowel matching can help with matching Sound. The bit I’ve called One Voice is the hardest part. It’s 100% mental. It’s the transition from singing together to singing as one. You can’t achieve it without a certain mastery of the other aspects of unit sound.

There are several techniques that spring to mind to assist in promoting these skills in a quartet.

• Sing in a circle – only back-to-back. It’s a totally different aural experience.
  
• Use vowel vocalises to focus your ears on matching – this is why ‘warming up’ as a quartet is essential. My fave is the 5 vowel unison-split to chord, followed by 5 chord tag sung on those vowels (‘I Sing Barbershop’ tag chords). More on that and how to make the most of it if you ask me!
  
• Duetting – if you can’t hear the lead, you’re too loud. MATCH volume, bass/lead and bari-below/lead to give her full support without drowning her out. See my other posts on why duetting is brilliant.
  
• Sing lying down, with your heads in the centre. This totally changes how gravity affects your breathing mechanism and facial mask. It’s much harder to force chest voice (therefore much easier to mix into head tone) lying down, so you end up with an open, relaxed tone which is easier to mesh with the rest of the quartet.
  
• Bitch pitch. And ALWAYS lift the octaves and 5ths (that’s YOU baris and basses).
  
• Break down phrases to identify target vowels and ensure all 4 voices match. Watch out for consonant clusters.
  
• Voicebox Tunnel – get your lead to sing “wee wee wee” (slow and strong) on an Eb or so in her best resonant, open tone. Stand in front of her, adjusting for height so that her voice is projecting directly into the back of your neck (your voicebox). Sing the “wee wee wee” with her, matching her sound as much as you can, feeling her voice resonating through your voicebox and out through your mouth, mixed with your sound. This can be a really weird experience at first! Get the other 2 to stand out front and comment on the blend. This is the best exercise I know to get in touch with the Lead sound. Thanks Dede :-) You can do this with phrases from your song too.
  
• Use One Voice – more on this soon.

The Secret To Success

What is the secret to success?

1. Decide how you define success, then
2. Be totally committed to CHANGE in order to achieve it, then
3. BE successful, ALL THE TIME.

For example, if my friend wants to succeed at singing with open, unweighted sound. She must:

1. define success as a consistently open and unweighted sound, through all dynamics and pitch ranges,
2. commit to relaxing her throat, opening her mouth cavity, placing the sound somewhere on the hard palette (depending on vowel) and keeping the sound moving and alive, for each vowel sung, without dropping anything between vowels regardless of breaths or consonants,
3. ensure that every time she sings a single note or more, she sings with that vocal definition, and stops if she finds she's singing the 'old' way.

It's simple, yet making permanent change to our physical and mental singing habits is one of the hardest things you can attempt! It takes discipline, and sometimes, a helpful ear that can keep you in line until the skills become YOUR CHOICE (you can easily correct yourself). Then it's up to you to never sing it any other way!