One of the difficult things about finding a voice teacher I’d be happy to work with was finding one who understood the style of music I wanted to sing. I don’t, for instance, want to sing classical music or have classical-sounding voice. So although I know that some exercises and techniques are universal, I’m not likely to want to put the time and money into working on songs or styles that are far removed from how I want to sound when I sing. With my new voice teacher we’re solving that problem by working initially on the songs I actually sing. We started with a long conversation about who I am and what I do – and want to do – musically. He’d visited my website before our first meeting, so he had an idea, and observed that I was clearly a working musician at this point. I then sang a song of mine – I chose Between the White Lines, because I’m comfortable with it. He stopped me halfway through, saying “well, you don’t have any problems with intonation” (see previous blog post), which makes for an easier starting point, but that he thinks I have a lot more range than I’m using and can do a lot more with my voice to give me options for the kind of dynamics Jack Williams pointed out that I should be working towards. And that can also help avoid any small intonation issues (which I think I do have, at least at the margins) by giving each note a lot more space within which to place my tone. He then suggested that I play the song a whole step lower. Which I did – it was a challenge (we actually started a step and a half lower but that was too hard), and changed some aspects of the song. Since volume is one of my issues, he had me sing a line a few times as loudly as I could, and then went into a different room and asked me to yell for him as loudly as possible – and then sing that line exactly that way. We then spent a bunch of time learning and going through a set of vocal exercises. Most involved starting on one note, sliding up (with no distinct notes in between – surprisingly difficult) to the 5th, and then back down to the 1. Each is done on a different vowel sound but it wasn’t just about the vowels, it was about creating a certain shape/feel of a note, which was different across each version. For each it involved placing the note in a different location physically, which took some practice to get right. In all of them I started the exercise on a note, went up a half step at a time until I was at the top of my range, and then came down a half-step at a time as low as I could go, ending much lower than where I started. One revelation was that doing the exercises had me producing notes much lower than I thought I could sing, with good sound quality. He then had me sing the song again (in its new, lower, key) while not thinking about anything in particular technique-wise, but having had the experience of doing the exercises. The song suddenly sounded good in that lower key, without my actively doing anything. He then took the chorus and had me intentionally sing the vowels in two specific shapes that I’d learned in the exercises. It was my first experience intentionally placing the notes somewhere, producing them in a specific way. (I’ve never thought about what I was doing when I was singing.) Suddenly I had all sorts of volume I’d never had before. It was a revelation! We’re approaching vocal coaching as a question of performance. Although we’ll spend the bulk of our time on vocal exercises and techniques, we’ll also work on things in the context of my music specifically, so that I can learn how to sing and arrange the songs that I intend to be performing. He warned me that he’ll probably want to stretch my style a bit and have me sing some covers of things outside my usual repertoire, but that the real goal is to teach me better vocal technique through the type of songs I want to be singing. One caveat is that we’ll be focusing mostly on songs that aren’t currently in my core set, because otherwise if we play around with how I sing a song it might really screw with my ability to perform it until I become comfortable with a new way of singing it. So I’ll have to start thinking about what songs are worth working but not in my core set. I’m excited about this process, and impressed with the initial experience!