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 :)