My last lesson

My last lesson for the semester was pretty short. We really just went through my rep. I need to work on a couple diction issues on An die musik, and continue practicing O cessate to make sure that I don't go all nasaly and stuff. I am actually feeling really prepared for juries, which is actually a really weird feeling. I have everything memorized, and I know all the right notes and everything so I'm really just hoping that Dr.H and Dr.Lofgren pick the songs I want! It has been a pretty successful semester, and I'm really happy with the progress I've made. I'm finally starting to get vibrato a little bit which is super exciting. Maybe someday I'll have a real singing voice after all!

Aubrey's LAST lesson!!

Well, this was probably our worst lesson ever. Depressing, I know. We hadn't had a lesson for like 3 weeks or something like that from me being gone for convention and her being sick and stuff so I figured it would be a little rough, but I didn't think it would be that bad. Right off the bat I was irritated before we even started because she told me earlier that day that she'd lost her music. I now know how Dr.Hepworth and Dr.C and all the other professors feel when we don't come to lessons and class prepared. Luckily, she found it so that was good, but I could tell right away that she didn't really want to be doing this lesson. I told her that we were going to start with lip buzzes and she rolled her eyes and she didn't like even remember how to do them. Right then I got in panic mode a little bit. So we did some lip buzzes and after that we were going to do some sliding I's on a fifth. I had her do couple sirens before so she could remember where her head voice was. Then I changed my mind to do some of the sing ah talking and then sing ah singing. In hindsight, I really did not manage this lesson very well. She was lost from the start so I should've took things way slower. I just really didn't expect her to like forget how to do everything we talked about. After we did a few sing ah sing ahs  we did some mI on a sliding fifth. She did okay with the sing ahs. She would start out in the head voice and did a pretty good job talking in it, but once she'd have to go sing it she would tighten up and there just wasn't any resosnance and it was just all tight and pinchy. As we were going up on the mI I started telling her to think lighter because I thought maybe that would help her get into the weak feeling head voice, but it really just made her sing quieter which I really should've saw coming. I told her to get a lot of space in her mouth and do the head voice and I told her to get the buzziness in her nose. But she STILL tried squeezing her chest voice up as we ascended. So I just stopped with that and went to the sing ah. I told her not to open up to the ah until she she got a nice buzzy feeling in her nose. She was feeling the buzz until she opened up and then she said it felt tight. I told her that she needed to have a nice open throat and  a raised soft palate. I tried doing this thing that I saw Dr.Lofgren doing in one of his lessons. I had her do a siren starting on a note, but that really didn't work at all. She really hates dropping her jaw so I had to keep reminding her of that, and when I had her do puppy whimpers she still wants to use her throat to muscle up the sound but we got a few good ones in at the end. Then just to do a couple more warm ups we did some I ahs up and down five and she did okay with it. I know she doesn't like Is so I just let her do some ahs so she could get her jaw dropped. We started on the song and she was singing it incredibly nasaly and her vowels were really bad. Also, she was not really using her head voice at all. I wanted her to tell me what she thought she did right and wrong. We decided that she had good phrasing and we came to the conclusion that she was using her chest voice on the high parts. We also said that she wasn't opening her mouth very wide throughout the song. We also touched on a few of the vowels that she needed to fix. There is a couple spots that there is an a, c, e, f and we worked on it a whole bunch of times and she just could not get it into her head voice no matter what we tried. I told her to sing it like an opera singer and she mostly just sang it louder, but it did make her open her mouth more. We talked about thinking skinny when she got to the high notes and to hold her hands in front of her like a tepee and I explained because that will remind her to lift her soft palate. I had her read through the text in a head voicey sound and she towards the song she just started talking like normal. The last page she was just pure talking through her nose in a really nasaly voice. We went through the song for the last time and she actually did really well singing through it. She got in her head voice most of the times she needed to. Then we were finished and I apologized for having the last lesson so far away from the others because I really think that just caused a lot of problems for this one, but oh well. I think that if we would've had a consistent lesson time every week we could've acccomplished a ton more things. I think she did learn some stuff, but I don't know if she'll apply it to her everyday singing or not. She's stuck in the pop sounding world! But I told her she'd learn to love her head voice someday just like me :)

Aubrey's fifth lesson

We started with lip buzzes like usual. I didn't really want to spend too much time warming up because we really hadn't been working on her song too much, and we only had two lessons left! Then I had her do a couple sirens and some puppy whimpers. She has a really hard time with puppy whimpers for some reason. She just tries to do them with her throat and it is the weirdest thing. No matter how much I explain that she doesn't need to do it in her throat and it's all in her head and nose, she just doesn't like to grasp that concept. I explained to her that what she was doing was just making her vocal folds slap together and she gets a really hard sound coming out, and I know she can feel what she's doing is wrong. Every time she does get it right she hates the way the buzz feels in her nose so I don't know if that has something to do with it. Then we started doing the sing ah in a talking voice and then singing it like she did with Dr.Hepworth when we visited her a while ago. She really doesn't like to open her mouth up very wide and it traps a ton of the sound in. We tried doing sing-ahs down five and I told her to keep the buzz in her nose and when we went down that helped her keep the buzz a little better. I can't even count the times I told her that when she's using her head voice it's going to be weak. Then we did I vowels and we're constantly having to do sirens to feel her head voice. We did sliding I's going down a fifth and she did really well with that. She said it felt weird and I took that as a success. Then we went up five on an I and right away she started trying to pinch it off with her throat so we had to keep doing sirens on an I. I felt like she would start out with her head voice but as she ascended she would switch back into her chest or just try and squeeze the sound off. I tried having her do an ah vowel because I thought maybe it would make her feel a little more open. It wasn't really working. So I tried doing the thing where I had her sing like a 5 year old and then 15 and then like she was like 20 or something and then like she was 80. Epic fail. I don't know why I said 80 first of all, and second of all it just did not work like I thought it would. I was hoping that it would make her open up but it really didn't, and then I did it and I just sounded like a flipping idiot. But oh well. We started her song and I told her to think like opera singer and hooty before her entrances just so she doesn't forget about the head voice. First we just spoke through the rhythm of the song to be sure that she'd get all the note values correct. I told her to really over exaggerate her words and to connect some of them. Also, I am a terrible accompaniment player. She was singing very pinched so we spoke through the words in a hooty voice. There's an arpeggio in her song that's a, c, e and so we did some I's on it and she got in her head voice a little better after that. She was still singing very closed mouth so I had her put her hands on the sides of her face and watch in the mirror to be sure that her jaw was dropping. She got through the rest of the song really well. We fixed the word fly on the f5 because she was spreading out the word a little bit so I told her to make it taller. Every time we had to start the song we had to talk through it in a head voice which was getting a little irritating to me, but she'd always get it if we'd do that. She wouldn't get it at all if we didn't do that first. I told her to start switching into her head voice at an a4 so that she'd have an easier transition into the high notes because she wouldn't switch until she'd get up to about an d5. She did really well with that train of thought. Side note: It doesn't sound half as good on a recording as it did in real life. And I hate listening to myself on the recording. It gives me the creeps. Anyways, we ran through the song again and I had to remind her a few times to go into her head voice. She started out really well, but as the song went on she kept wanting to use her chest voice. It was definetly the best she ever sang it though. I tried to just really assure her that her head voice sounded really beautiful because I could tell that she was hating the way things were sounding. That was easily the best lesson we had, and I think she liked that we actually got to work on the rep versus just doing a thousand warm ups the whole lesson.