Aubrey's First Voice Lesson.

Well here's to round two!...It was sooooooooooo much easier this time around with Aubrey. It was a lot easier to stay kind of on track with my lesson plan and I felt more in control because I actually knew that the things I was explaining to her were right. Well, I hope anyways. She was really excited right off the bat to take these lessons which made me really excited! She's my cousin so I know that she loves to sing. She went to Newman Grove for high school where she sang in the choir all four years. Now, Newman Grove is a super small school and their choir only consisted of maybe like 15 people tops. Aubrey was a soprano, and I knew she was pretty much the voice of the choir. I was kind of worried that she was going to come in with a mentality that she already knew how to sing, and would be a little resilient to my suggestions. However, she had a really open mind which was awesome. At the beginning of the lesson I asked her what she thought she needed to improve on and she said her tone. Looking back I wish I would've asked exactly what she meant by that. I'm guessing she meant just her tone in general because she is definitely more of a hypofunctional singer. She is really breathy, and as she ascends the breathiness just increases. She said she can read rhythms and knows the basic theory stuff so that'll make things easier once we get some rep worked into our lessons. I think I'm just going to bring some super basic theory stuff like note values and dynamic markings to the next lesson just to be sure. When we went over breathing she was taking really high breaths, but after I explained to her that she needs a low breath, and she can get that by breathing and her stomach comes out she caught on pretty quickly. It'll take a while for her to be comfortable with it, but I'm going to be sure to address it at every lesson. We talked about the tongue and did the kitty, ducka, today, and tongue trill exercises. She had no problem with the tongue trills, but the kitty, ducka, and today proved to be more difficult for her. Then we did some sliding ee's because I wanted her to find out about the buzz. Since she was so breathy I told her to try and make herself sound nasaly and to bring her sound into the nose. She felt really uncomfortable with that, but I know from experience that it's really weird to start doing. We worked on the e vowel for a while and added in the oh, oo, and ah vowels. She wasn't really dropping her jaw or shaping her vowels so we talked about that for a while too. I had her do some puppy whimpers to get that feeling of buzziness in the nose. She feels very uncomfortable, but can definitely tell a difference in the sound. I'm so glad I decided to teach a girl now because I feel a lot more confident. I think the next lesson I might introduce some ideas for rep to her, but for the most part we'll just go over the basics again.