Vocal Ped Paper
Over the course of the
semester I had the opportunity to teach two students, one for 4 lessons and the
other one for 2 lessons. The experiences were very different. The first
student, Jae, I had an opportunity to teach in the classroom with everyone
else. He had almost no singing experience, but was very fun to work with.
Having taught one lesson to a freshman girl with little to no success last
semester I remembered that what made it so difficult was that I wanted the
student to be able to sing well right of the bat, without giving them all the
tools and time that they would need in order to accomplish any level of
singing. Teaching to me can be kind of like working at restaurant, the customer
is always right, sorta. The reason being is that because all the work (or most
of the work) is done by the student, it’s up to me, the teacher, to unlock
their ability that they may not have known existed. Jae didn’t have good breath
support, so working on bending over and getting his breath working was very important
to me. Pitch was even a worse issue, but it was increasingly difficult to get
the pitch corrected without the help of a good breath. Often I would observe
him raising his shoulders and not singing from the chest and diaphragm. Alas,
it was only after repeated corrections that he was able to sing somewhat on
pitch. The first 3 lessons went on tediously, really sticking to one or two
exercises that encouraged pitch matching and scales. By the 4th
lesson I really tried to sing with him, and he was very capable of singing on
pitch (or close there-to) when I sang with him. What I found was that the
emotional connection he had with singing helped him more than anything, singing
angrily or with sadness provided him more context from which to draw breath.
The one thing I could improve on with Jae was my patience. After that third
lesson and I was making little progress it really made me reconsider my
approach, not so much to be aggressive, but that if something didn’t work I
wanted to try something radically different.
People
often hate on that singer voodoo that people use, but with a very beginning
level student they worked really well—the imagery that I used with Jae and even
my Lounge singer was the idea of walking up and escalator going down, and also
the image of candle-wax burning. Both of these ideas are tangible enough and
moving that it really gets the singer on his or her breath. The goal for me
with a singer, is to always get them thinking about movement, the movement
inside in order that their oven is churning the burning flame, as if there is
this large piston of energy and it needs to be pulled by the artist or singer
in order to keep the current and flow moving. It is when we stagnate in singing
that I feel we choke, when I lose that relaxation that’s when the pitch suffers
and we choke. It is my desire in teaching especially to relax the student. A
lot of times it is because the singer doesn’t feel comfortable, even
professional singers don’t feel prepared sometimes, that they trip themselves
up
With my second singer, he was actually making money singing
already as a lounge singer, but his problems were a little easier to diagnose
because he had some idea of his technique. Often times it would come from the
vowel connection. He was trying to go up to a high B with no support, and so we
literally broke it down, took it an octave lower, and evened out the phrase,
first by using only vowels, and then singing back to the original octave while
slowly adding the words back in. Adding in the proper conception of the pitches
(the phrases he was having difficulty with he didn’t really know the pitches) he felt prepared enough and went from
being unable to sing above an G# comfortably to singing the whole Bruno Mars
phrase perfectly (as perfect to my ears). It came down to vowel preparation and
then finally the support of his breath. The candle wax idea really worked for
him, but he also wanted to get the tune correct, so the fact that both of our
communication for the subject was focused on the same goal made it easier to
teach him. Jae, in contrast, was literealy starting from ground zero with no
training, so the conception of pulling something out of someone whom has no
conception of what to pull could be more challenging.
Overall
over the course of the semester I really enjoyed watching everyone take on the
challenge of new singers and fumbling, or succeeding around with the different
images and techniques. It was really fun to peer into everyone’s different
styles and see what worked best, those with a smile and who spoke confidently
seemed to get the most results. In the future I want to be more direct with the
exercises, explaining the purpose fully of each one instead of just throwing them
into the work—if a singer has a conception of what they want for themselves, in
my opinion, they are likely to be more successful.
