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.