Aubrey's Third Voice Lesson.

After this lesson I felt really excited because I thought we made a break through, but I just got done listening to the recording, and it just sounds like a train wreck to me. We started right away with lip buzzes and talked about breathing and she did just fine on both of those. We did some i's to try to find the buzz, but for some reason she just cannot stand doing them. I am pretty sure she is just trying really hard to do it from her throat. She told me she'd been practicing the Mrs.Doubtfire voice and she has a pretty decent grasp on how that feels and along with  doing sirens she knows how the head voice is supposed to feel. She just doesn't like to connect it with her singing. We did some sing ah's because I was hoping that she'd be able to get all the resosnance in her nose and be able to hold onto it into the ah, but she had a hard time even holding the ng through all five notes. She still was just trying to muscle up the sound too. Then I asked her how she felt when she was doing that and she said she felt like her throat was closed so I pretty much just stopped with that. When we were doing i's I tried making her spread her mouth out real wide to get a really harsh i sound and to show some teeth. I had to look like a freaking idiot the way I was showing her how to do this and I don't even know if it worked. She sings so hypofunctionally that I think it's just really uncomfortable for her to sing in her nose. The best part of the lesson happened when we were doing I think i's and I was telling her just to sing from her head. To me, that makes sense, I think it made sense to her too because I would tell her to think really light and that she couldn't use her throat at all and to think of keeping her soft palate raised and then all of a sudden she just did it right! And I asked her how it felt and she said amazing it was so easy. That was like the coolest feeling ever. We got it a couple more times after that and we were getting a little low on time and I wanted to introduce her rep to her so we stopped with that stuff. I picked out Greensleves by Philip Kern and To the Sky by Carl Strommen. I played and sang a little of both for her and kind of hinted that I wanted her to do To the Sky because I just really like it...that's probably not allowed, but it's just really pretty! So she picked that one and we started singing it. She right away went to her chest voice and was breathing in weird places so we just talked about phrasing for the rest of the lesson. I feel like we are not doing near enough singing. I feel like I am just way over explaining stuff, and I never stick to my lesson plan because something will happen and I'll go in a whole opposite direction. I also feel like I can't play enough warm ups on the piano. The only thing I know how to do are five pattern things. I think I should really know more than that, and I probably do but I just don't know it. It's so hard tailoring a practice to somebody else other than myself.  Like when I practice, I already know what I want and need to work on, but then getting into someone else's head is a whole other ball game. I'm still really glad that we made the one break through we did, and she tells me that she feels like she's learning a ton so I guess that's good. I guess I'm just a little disappointed after listening to how that lesson played out.