When training teen singers, I don’t encourage a specialization in repertoire. If they are going to audition for music degrees, they often have to prepare repertoire from classical, musical theatre, and popular styles. Having a generally tension-free voice with two octaves of usable range and a clear connection to the text and a well-prepared audition […]
Tag: crossover
Training the voice – genre agnostic?
Brad Jenks, a Chicago area voice teacher, recently made me aware of his excellent blog post. He questions the walls that exist between “classical” and “____” voice instruction. I agree with every word, and enjoy the thoughtful and good-humored way in which he describes the issue. Peter T. Harrison also discusses this topic in Singing: […]
Covering many artists can mess you up
Let’s say that you are a young singer in a good band. You start working, playing nightclubs, BBQ joints, any place that will pay you. You cover lots of songs and lots of bands. You come for voice lessons and you start to describe your challenges. “When I sing Eleanor Rigby, I have trouble getting […]
What is the point of this weird exercise?
The human voice was designed to make a huge gamut of sounds: soft and loud, high and low pitches, many tonal qualities, many stop and start patterns, sustained tones or extremely changeable riffs, runs, slides, and other gymnastics. The physical skills that the singer must train, like those of the baseball player, gymnast, dancer, potter, […]
Fancy Old Vocalises and Modern Singing
The Bel Canto repertoire required singers to be able to sing high and low, loud and soft, slow and fast, including the ability to trill. The music of that genre was designed to exploit these parameters. The kinds of exercises in use in the early 19th century which developed these capabilities were not so different […]
There is only one you
Lately we have access to everything. We can hear singers from the past and present in almost any genre whenever we want. This affects our taste and our aspirations as singers. Classical singers going for training in popular styles want to learn how to belt. A guy with a Johnny Cash voice may want to […]
Why I love karaoke
I did karaoke in public for the first time in August. I’ve gone back every 2 to 3 weeks since then. Although I have been primarily a musical theatre and classical singer, I decided that in the 2010-2011 I would pursue some new things. I have been delighted with my karaoke experiences, for some surprising […]
Stretching
This Friday I will be going to Winchester, VA to participate in Level 1, 2, and 3 training with Jeannette Lovetri’s program. (http://www.thevoiceworkshop.com/shen.html) It is an intensive 9 days of the study of vocal pedagogy for “contemporary commercial music”. That term makes me wince a little, but it is probably better than “nonclassical”. Why? There […]
Singing and Fluting
This is inspired by Craig’s comment on my previous entry. As I have dusted off my flute and played it again after very little activity in the last 7 years, I am finding it refreshingly different than previous times that I came back from breaks. I have been fearful of playing flute again largely because […]
Legit and non-legit
These are styles, not physiological phenomena. There may be common tendencies in the technical approaches to some songs in some styles, but there are not hard and fast rules. An attempt to try to describe belt as “constricted” reflects a misunderstanding of what an ideal performance of a belt song would sound like. Judy Garland […]