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First, Happy New Year to everyone!
For the next few posts, I am going to focus on acting while singing. To become a proficient actor, there are some simple themes that once you master will allow you to feel confident in your acting. Once you put music on top of acting, however, things become much more complicated. Music has a tendency to fight with a 'natural' acting style. Fortunately, once you understand the issues involved with acting while singing, most of these issues are easily corrected. DWS The past week has been a wonderful time for me as a voice teacher. I've had the opportunity to experience my own students (former and current) singing success on big stages and the amount of pride and excitement I have is just great.
1) Maddie Baillio premiered as Tracy in NBC's Hairspray Live! You can't get a bigger stage than that. She sounded great and looked like she was having a great time. Maddie graduated from Clear Falls HS in League City. 2) Shriya Varma sang a duet from Vivaldi's Gloria with the joint choirs of Clear Lake United Methodist, Clear Brook and Clear Lake High Schools. I was excited for her and she did a great job preparing a difficult duet. 3) Not only do I have 4 students who made it past Pre-Area auditions, 2 of them were ranked as the best singer in their voice type! Congrats to Zach Hoover, Hannah Killingsworth, Justin Pollio and Sebastian Fernandez! DWS Most experienced voice teachers focus on vocal production through exercises based on vowels - sing on 'ah' or 'ee,' for example.
However, musical expression often comes through the consonants. When you listen to your favorite singers, do you notice how they shape particular words? Most likely, they are using a word's consonants to give a certain 'color' or tone quality for the word. When I work with my singers, I really pay attention to how they express the music through both their acting and their word shaping. A little change in how you say a word - lingering on the 'l' in "love" or a sharp 'b' in "bitter" - can have a tremendous impact on the audience and how well you convey the song. DWS So about that promise to start blogging...
As you can imagine, having two little ones running around has caused quite the time crunch. I am finally getting around around to my commitment to resuming my regular blogs on technique. I want to focus my attention on the "ee" vowel, which can cause considerable issues for singing. In particular, male singers seem to particularly struggle with tongue tension when singing "ee." The result of all this tongue tension can be a muffled tone, strained high notes, and nasality. One of my favorite exercises to combat this is to hold your jaw down and alternate between the "ah" and "ee" on a scale. The key is to only move your tongue to form the two vowels. The jaw should remain immobile. Try it. It's a lot harder than you think! After using his exercise for a few lessons, most students can produce a better "ee" vowel with noticeable reductions in tongue tension. As with all vocal exercises, you need a good teacher to tinker and adapt this exercise for your vocal needs. DWS So, as you may have heard, being a parent is a little time-consuming! I've been neglectful of this blog and will be taking a new route with posts. Each month, I will be posting a video of a vocal technique, warmup, or explanation of some vocal concept. I hope this gives everyone an idea of how voice lessons can benefit you.
DWS Maddie Baillio, a former voice student from Clear Falls High School, was recently cast as Tracy Turnblad, for NBC's production of Hairspray.
I'm so, so proud of Maddie and her successes! Click on this link here that gives a more in-depth interview of her audition and background. Keep up the momentum Maddie! DWS I have a female student who is cast as the lead as Eve in a production with Bay Area Harbour Playhouse (in Dickinson) and they are still looking for their male lead and reached out to me.
If you or any of your friends might be interested, please have them contact Fred Pearl at [email protected] to set up an audition. Information on the musical is below. The Playhouse is a small community theater that puts on musicals and plays year-round. Thank you, DWS From the Producer: The show is called Falling for Eve, published by Theatrical Rights Worldwide. It is a fictional retelling of the Garden of Eden story where Eve eats the apple and is thrown out of the Garden of Eden, but Adam does not. Consequently the two are separated and discover that they love each other, and find that there can be no Paradise without love (each other). Its a touching and humorous story with only 6 parts. We will rehearse music once a week based on our schedules until the second week of January. Then we will begin rehearsing on stage Monday through Thursday from 6-9 until the show opens. The show opens Friday the 12th of February and runs 4 weekends (Fri, Sat, Sun) for 12 shows in all. I have left the role of Adam open at this time.
I was awarded a "Best of 2015" Award from Thumbtack! I've had students contact me through this website before, and I'm honored to have received so many positive rewards!
DWS 
While this is quite advance notice, I'm so excited by this project I wanted to post about ASAP. I will be singing a variety of early Broadway, jazz, Buble, and Stevie Wonder songs in February 2016 as a Valentine concert! It is a wide variety of music, but it all fits in together quite nicely.
The concert is going to be a LOT of fun, with other musicians playing guitar, piano, sax, drums, and bass guitar. We had out first rehearsal in July, and it went wonderfully! Our next rehearsal is August 18th to go through some trouble spots. After that, we will take a hiatus and rehearse closer to the concert date. I look forward to seeing you there! DWS |
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