I made a lot of great discoveries while practicing and in my lesson this week. I started adding a section for specific struggles in my practicing to my practice journal so that I can remember what parts need more work in songs, and remember what questions to address at my lessons. This helped me focus my practicing time and "shelf" problems that I didn't have the brain space to worry about right away. This also helped because I had a record of where I saw the technical problems in my singing, so when we did figure out some strategies in my lesson, I knew where to apply them.
I also noticed that my tongue was really tight, and that made some of the diction difficult. I spent a lot of time on vowels this week and we discovered in my lesson that when I try to create the vowel or posture it, I end up with a lot of tongue tension. It helped to find space between my molars with my fingers and then just speak the words as I normally would. The only place my vowels really needed work was on [a] and the diphthong [ai]. The first one compresses further forward than I was trying to manufacture by positioning my articulators, and the second one just needs more time spent on the first vowel. The solutions were much simpler than I was originally trying to create.
I also found that I was losing air towards the end of phrases this week, and that my range from A4 down to C4 was really finicky. In my lessons we discovered that as I reached the ends of phrases, especially those that came down, I lost air energy quickly. As I imagined crescendo-ing in energy towards the end of the phrase it made a huge difference. The other things that helped were practicing my mid to low range on fricatives like [z] and [v]. In that area of my voice I was bringing my folds together with muscle and not air so the transition downward was not smooth. I was flipping right over into a completely muscled sound. Singing a crescendo-ed downward arpeggio on [fa], and letting it stay very light until the bottom helped with this as well.
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