To be honest, practicing was a rough go over the break. I did practice, it just all felt very scattered and often left me in a state of some anxiety. I would get quickly overwhelmed and overly critical. Even though this was frustrating, I learned a lot about effective practicing. Some of these discoveries include:
- Mindfulness before I practice makes a huge difference, even if I am not in my practice room on campus
- I need to schedule a start and end time for my practice so that I don't obsess.
- I need to set goals or intentions before I practice about what I want to focus on and achieve.
I also made some technical discoveries this week as well. I realized in my musical theatre music, I have far to much subglottal pressure-- I simply do not need as much air flow as I do in classical. My push for classical space and air flow created a lot of tension and squeezing my throat. I used a lot of speaking exercises this week to help me find a more natural place for my MT technique and it feels so much better.
In my classical singing, I realized that I have a (at least somewhat) fake vibrato. My tongue and muscles around the larynx are moving it to create my vibrato. My hypothesis is that I am not getting the right air flow so I have some tension to stabilize my larynx and have to manufacture vibrato rather than it happening "naturally." Honestly, noticing that was very very discouraging. However, I did succeed in experimenting with some things to find a deeper breath. I have made the decision to hold off on changing anything too much though until after NATS. I'm just going to focus on taking better breaths between phrases between now and Saturday and then I'll start to really try and problem solve.
Comments
Post a Comment