 COVID has been a challenge for everyone. My family has been fortunate in that we have not suffered economic hardship, but my wife has been working non-stop since March, putting in 80+ work weeks as a choir teacher. Her summer 'break' consisted of one Zoom meeting after another so that her school would be able to make virtual schooling much more productive than when it was sprung on our communities last spring.
This was our first kid-free date in six months. We drove to Galveston for a late dinner at Willie G's Seafood and stayed overnight at Harbour Hotel. As you can see, we are really happy and had a wonderful time. It was re-energizing and I felt like I fell in love with my wife all over again. I couldn't do this pandemic and raise our children without her. She is an incredible human being and I'm so proud to call her my wife. DWS Since March, I have taught singing lessons online and learned how to create the best sound quality for my students. The closer you sound to an in-person voice lesson, the easier my job is because I hear a more accurate vocal picture!
First, please use your computer for your voice lessons. Phones tend to have poorer microphones and speakers. In addition, if you can hook an external mic and/or headset, sound quality is much stronger. You don't need get a $100 external mic (though it does help!). I have had great success with students using their gaming headsets and even cheap external earbuds that they use for their iPhones! I highly recommend you use Zoom. While Facetime, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger and other telecommuting solutions work for voice lessons, they lack certain features to enable the best sound quality for music analysis. Once you start your first voice lesson, click the '^' symbol on the 'mute' button. This will allow you to click "Audio Settings," which allows us to tinker with Zoom and how it adjusts the sound. In the next screen, you will go to where it says 'Microphone' and UNCLICK the box that says "Automatically Adjust Microphone Volume." Two more spaces down, you will see an option for "Suppress Background Noise." Change that setting to "Low." Then in the bottom-right corner of the screen, click the "Advanced" button. This is where the real magic happens! Click the box that says "Show in-meeting option..." This is the critical selection. Every telecommuting software, in an effort to make speech as intelligible as possible, reduces background noise. Unfortunately, music is interpreted as "background noise" because it is sustained! By clicking this option, it prevents a lot of the automatic muting by the software when you sustain a pitch. Finally, click the two options that state "Disable Echo Cancellation" and "High Fidelity Music Mode." Return to the main screen where you see your voice teacher in the large screen. In the top left corner, you should see a box that says "Turn Original Sound On." Click it and it becomes blue and says "Turn Original Sound Off." Viola! You are setup for voice lessons! DWS This vocal phrase comes to me from a voice lesson I had in college. During the summer, I was accepted into Opera in the Ozarks, a prestigious summer “opera camp” in Arkansas where lots of young artists can focus solely on their craft with minimal distractions. And when I say minimal distractions, I do mean MINIMAL…the nearest town is Eureka Springs, and it’s not exactly a metropolis! That being said, the scenery is out of this world and I grew a lot as a singer.
During one of my vocal coaching sessions, I was working on a French aria from Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. The pianist was getting increasing frustrated and finally, he just snapped – “stop trying to sound like an opera singer, and just sing like you speak!” That phrase, “sing like you speak,” helped me tremendously and I stopped putting ‘artificial’ sounds in my voice and sang with a far more natural delivery. What exactly does “sing like you speak” mean? And how does it apply in a voice lesson? The phrase can be useful in different contexts:
I do want to add that “sing like you speak,” as is true of most voice lesson phrases, has to be managed with care. Applied incorrectly, it could easily result in a tinny, overly bright quality in which there is little resonance. The next post on phrases you’ll hear in lessons, especially choral directors: “Spin the Air” In singing lessons, voice teachers use a bunch of cliched sayings that seem wacky at first glance. “Breath from your toes” and “Sing like you speak” are some of my personal favorites in terms of the physical impossibility. Yet these phrases have very specific uses in voice lessons that DO help students figure out how to sing, if used appropriately.
Before we get into one of these phrases, I do want to say that teaching voice is as much a psychological effort as it is a mechanical effort. While our instruments, our voices, all work in the same way (generally speaking), our brains decidedly do not. So much of teaching is understanding how your voice student thinks and interprets the information you are giving them in voice lessons. One phrase may be incredibly beneficial to one student and do absolutely nothing for another student. The first phrase we will discuss is one that has several variations on breathing. If you have taken voice lessons, at some point you heard “Breath from your stomach/toes/whole body etc…” We know that this is a physical impossibility. We take air into our lungs. It is impossible for the body (and probably dangerous!) to breath into our stomachs or any other body part! But this phrase is used by almost all voice teacher. What gives? Well, to understand the phrase, you have to understand there are two types of breathing, both used for different purposes. The first type of breathing is anaerobic. Anaerobic breathing is when you take a quick gulp of air, typically gasping for air when you are exercising. It is designed to take in as much air as possible in a short period of time. For obvious reasons, that is pretty valuable for activities such as running or playing a sport. However, anaerobic breathing is less useful for singing, which is why we use aerobic breathing. Aerobic breathing is when we take a long, deep breath. It requires our diaphragm to descend and push other internal organs out of the way so that our lungs can taken in a full tank of air. This sort of breathing is much slower than anaerobic breathing, which makes it less useful for sports but of much greater use when activities are endurance-based. Singing, for the most part, is an endurance test. You know when you will breath and generally are singing at a slow enough pace to take an aerobic breath. Finally, aerobic breath has a huge singing benefit in that it actually EXPANDS your vocal range by relaxing the larynx, allowing you to sing higher pitches. Breathing correctly actually increases your vocal range! In voice lessons, using the phrase “breath from your stomach” or any other variation is simply a tool a voice teacher uses to encourage aerobic breathing. The phrase encourages students to take a slow, deep, relaxing breath that encourages the diaphragm to descend and make way for lungs to fully expand with air. And when this all occurs, students do see their stomach move from the breath because they are displacing that organ so the lungs can take in a full breath. My next post will be on personal favorite phrase – “Sing like you speak!” Until then! The second entry in my concert series is a song most of my voice students know well - "On the Street Where You Live." As a voice teacher, I love giving this song to my advanced tenors because it has a nice tessitura (average pitch range) for a young tenor without pushing their range too hard. The first video is the actual song; the second is a quick lecture on the origin and themes of the musical "My Fair Lady." which might be on of the most perfect musical theater shows in existence. In addition to numerous hit songs, the story and drama move easily and there really isn't a dull moment. Oddly enough, when the musical became a movie, Audrey Hepburn was cast as Eliza Doolittle even though they had to dub her singing voice because Hepburn apparently could not sing. Why they didn't cast Julie Andrews, who originated the role on Broadway and was a proven singing actress, is beyond me...but I'm not a Hollywood director! Before the pandemic hit, my plans for this summer included a vocal recital/lecture of famous Broadway show tunes and the history behind the musicals and composers. Since I cannot hold the concert in-person, I will upload the songs to my Youtube channel for your viewing pleasure! If you like the song, feel free to visit my YouTube page at clearlakevoices and subscribe so you will get the videos directly! The 'history behind the song' video is also on the Youtube page. I strongly encourage you watch that video as this song has quite a powerful message...Richard Rodgers' goal for the musical was to directly attack racism, which was a risky thing to do in 1948. DWS I watched Hamilton last night and – WOW! I had enjoyed the music but had never seen the work on stage and it lived up the hype. It is a GREAT piece of entertainment. But by the end of it, Hamilton got me to thinking – has it been miscategorized as a musical? Is it really an opera in disguise? Here are some elements that got me thinking:
The way I see it, the only reasons for Hamilton to be classified as a musical are two:
Before the pandemic hit, my big summer project was to dip my toes back into performing and give a concert singing show tunes from Broadway. Needless to say, that didn’t work out!
However, just as my singing lessons have moved online, so can the concert! Starting in a few days, I will be posting videos of the songs I intended to sing in-person. Each of these songs will be followed by me talking about how the song or musical has historical relevance today. I love history and musicals are full of interesting historical tidbits that make the songs themselves more enjoyable because you learn about what exactly motivated the composer and lyricist. Some of these mini “lectures” will discuss the internal motivation of the character or composer themselves. Other songs lend themselves to the societal or political statement the composer had in mind. And finally, some will just be about the bizarre and interesting life twists of the composers themselves. These will not be your typical boring history lectures full of birth and death dates, I PROMISE! Hope to see you at the concert, in a strange and exciting new way! In your typical voice lesson, voice teachers will spend a good half of your singing lesson on a variety of scales and warmups to improve your singing technique. This leads to the obvious but often unasked question – why am I doing this?
It is a very fair question, and I think the best way to answer it is to use a story attributed to Luciano Pavarotti’s training as a singer. Pavarotti is considered one of the greatest tenors of the 20th century. He was not just an opera singer; he developed a worldwide following as the fat, happy operatic Italian tenor, who along with Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo formed the Three Tenors. He achieved rare stardom in an operatic world that often seems removed from the wider pop culture. Pavarotti’s voice training, however, is the subject for this blog. When he began studying, his voice teacher supposedly did not permit Pavarotti to sing ANY songs for six months. What did they do in those six months? Apparently, they sang scale after scale on different vowels to focus solely on his singing technique. I think it is safe to say it worked well in his career! As a voice teacher, I do not personally subscribe to such a spartan line of teaching. I give my voice students songs to work on because voice lessons should be for fun as much as they are for self-improvement. However, the focus on scales and vowels is a crucial element to a good voice lesson. When you sing, the vast majority of your time is spent producing sound on a vowel. Just try singing on a consonant – it ain’t happening unless you are humming! If you sing and one of the vowels seems tight or not pronounced correctly, that is often the tale-tell sign of an issue in vocal production. Therefore, it logically follows that if you want to excel at singing, what you really need to excel at is the delivery of vowels on pitch for sustained periods. It is not a romantic ideal but it is the truth! Singing is a skill that for the most part can be trained. What we ascribe musicality and emotion to is more often not the effective skill, not luck or talent, of a well-trained singer who has learned how to use their instrument effectively. A good voice teacher is always focused on the end goal – how do I train my singers so that they have the technical ability to deliver the emotion they feel internally? When all is said and done, your technique ENABLES your musicality and emotion. If you would like to hear some of my incredible young singers, I will post a few of my students' online performances on my Facebook page Clear Lake Voices. It was a great show and experience that I will never forget! Just click the link above or go to www.facebook.com/clearlakevoices. I will post three to four videos over the next few days. Enjoy!
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