Genre-agnostic voice training

I typically teach a 60 minute lesson. Typically the first half is exercises. These exercises are for exploring potential and building functional abilities of the voice. The functional areas I cover are vowels, dynamics, range, and agility. The voice gets its exercise and many potentialities that it contains are explored. This includes all sorts of things that go beyond what the singer may actually do in performance.

This means that an opera singer may exercise softer sounds than they will ever sing on stage. A jazz singer may exercise louder sounds than they will ever sing into the mic. A belter will certainly exercise the upper part of their voice, and many sopranos will vocalize down to F3 or lower. I leave their performing genres out of this half of the lesson. This is what I mean by “genre-agnostic”. I don’t teach technical specialization until we’re actually working on actual repertoire that requires it, which is not what the vocal workout of the first half of the lesson is about. It’s incredibly freeing and fruitful for that belter to exercise and experience her high head voice, and for the classical baritone to croon in falsetto. There are benefits to getting out of our performing roles and exercising the WHOLE voice in ALL of its potential.