For the first installment of this series let’s talk about the commonly used word “spin”. I refer to a sung sound that has vibrato and a sense of ease. We…
Tag: terminology
Teaching voice cannot be as objective as teaching piano, because the instrument is ourselves! This creates all kinds of psychological, physical, and acoustical differences among singers. Look out for this…
In a discussion group recently, a colleague posted a video of a singer’s performance and asked for comments. The singer was singing in a very flexible, decorated pop style. It…
The term “register” in voice teaching is used many different ways. In general, a register is a group of pitches that have something in common, which is usually compared to…
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…
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.