Five Month Mark

It has now been five months since I began studying with my M, my new voice teacher and the improvements are many and noticeable.  I have gained greater ease and vibrancy, and my upper register is coming along. Now a G is “just a G”, and the rest is coming in easier than before- if not with full ease, then it is preparing to get there.

 

I still have to fight the age-old habit of ramming my voice when ascending to the higher register- compression + force does not make for a happy sound. Fortunately nowadays the incidence of this is less than it used to be, and I find myself constantly obsessing about it—when I can’t sing (due to it being too late in the day or too busy a day with other things) I find myself thinking about it, over and over and over, feeling the space within and imagining the process.

 

 

Breath support is another issue about which I had been confused all of these years. Essentially the approach I was taught initially, and which wasn’t re-checked all of these years- was the Germanic outwards push approach, which ended up causing a great deal of sub-glottal pressure.  M told me that the first thing she would fix would be my closed, narrow and high larynx before she proceeded to the breath issue. Finally, we’ve started working on that!

Fortunately, I have recorded videos of a good number of my classes to this day (I sometimes forget to bring the camera, a very handy i-Flip) and I review them regularly, watching myself.  Recently I found a recording I made a few months before I started studying with M, singing Il Mio Tesoro. Fortunately one of our lessons last month included working on issues on that same aria, as I was to sing at a public venue and that was one of my arias.

I have made a comparison recording (Mp3 file) which you can listen to by clicking on the image of the cassette below. You’ll find what an interesting difference five months make.

You will first hear part of the earlier recording, then you will hear snippets from the lesson in question.