There are singers and teachers who say “Men sing in chest voice throughout their whole range. They do not use falsetto in performance”. Oh boy. I look up performance clips…
Tag: terminology
What is “natural singing”? Sometimes we say that someone “is a natural” or that the music seems to come so “naturally” from their throats. What does that mean? If we…
[This is an excerpt from Chapter 3 “The Confusions”.] Long ago I thought of the human voice as an instrument, just in a different family than brasses and woodwinds and…
In baseball and track and tennis, they call mechanics “form”. Think about how that is different from controlling your body muscle by muscle. When I am being coached in weightlifting,…
For this article “mechanistic directive” means: an instruction for a specific physical action to make some aspect of singing work differently. Example: Make a widening stretch in the soft palate…
Sometimes when I’m talking shop with colleagues they will tell me about a recent course, workshop, or book that they have learned from. Sometimes they may say, “You probably know…
I have written about the dangers of an imagery-based mode of instruction for voice. Images are generally conveyed with words, sometimes also with gestures. Examples of imagery in voice teaching…
How imagery-based instruction works, in two scenarios:
Scenario A
- Teacher gives weird image-based concept, like “breathe through the soles of your feet” (real advice from a real voice teacher).
- She sings the passage to demonstrate.
- The student copies the demonstration.
- Teacher thinks the imagery “worked”, when really it’s modeling better singing that actually worked, and the student found the same effect in her own voice. The teacher may as well have said “feel it in your knees” as long as the demonstration was adequate.
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…
Let’s take a look at “cracking the code” of a teacher’s vocabulary. If you have been fortunate enough to have had a teacher who helped you acquire singing concepts that were…
This is a topic for a long book, but I’ll practice my conciseness skills. If you are teaching voice (or any other subject) and you use terminology such that “chair”…
What does “resonance” mean? You can look up different dictionary definitions as well as I can, but today let’s call it “maximum sound output per energy unit expended”. Let’s assume…
