The best discoveries of this week's practice culminated in my lesson. I'd been playing with encouraging more balance between breath and voice in the mid-low section of my range. I noticed I'd been pushing so much air, especially in choir OR having that lower range driven 100% by muscle action, and I struggled this week to find a balance. In my lesson I was able to find a healthy, balanced sound production that felt much smaller than I'd anticipated.
In our first exercise we did a lip buzz on an arpeggio. As we reached a certain point in my range (above the staff) I wasn't reaching the notes because I wasn't letting it flip up into a new register. When I did let it flip over, it was much smaller than I anticipated and flipped over and forward. This helped me find a much light and more focused place in all place through out my voice.
Then we moved to [va] on a 54321 in the low middle of my range. As I'm listening back to it, I realize that my [a] vowel is very wide and almost like [E], which is probably why Thomas had me switch to [vu] pretty quickly. The sound was lighter on [u] and took up less space in my skull, but as such, it had more focus to it even as I went down into the very low parts of my range.
We did our basic onset on an [a]. Originally I started the sound very heavy and with little focus. Thomas told me to lighten it up and it made so much difference. It wasn't quieter, but it had more focus and cleaner sound. He gave me a similar direction on our next exercise. I started singing [eja eja eja eja e] on a 54321 pattern in a very harsh and driven way. It felt open in my throat but I was trying to fill my whole skull/front of my face with the sound. Thomas directed me to let the sound be more "luxurious" and like the exercise before it lightened things up and made them feel smaller and focused. Even my lower register felt connected to my upper register without being off the voice. There was a gentle speech-like feeling to my singing while still keeping integrity through out my body.
The biggest break through came when used the [huŋa] exercise. I really helped me find and keep the feeling of focus, and helped me release the muscles of my tongue and velum so they weren't trying to control so much. I imagined that sound opening upwards in the back of my mouth and staying expanded even as I moved down the scale. As we did the exercise, I really felt (and accepted) the more focused or gathered feeling and realized that I'd had more muscled involved than was needed. The strength comes from the focus of the vowel. Similar to our 8531 on a fa exercise, this helped the sound focus and move forward in a smaller way. Then we flipped the exercises to a scale up and down. This was a little tricky so we simplified it to an octave slide up and down. The trick for me was to make the space for the top note in the first note. I also remembered the feeling of flipping the sound up and forward from the first exercise we did.
25:40 was an excellent example to use as a comparison.
We used [huŋa] to find the more balanced sound in Laurie's Song for a second. As long as I was able to remember the feeling of opening upward in the back, it created a very focused sound. We then used this in Spectre de la Rose to find the right balance of focus and lightness.
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