Instructor: Michael Mayer, http://vocalwisdom.com/
The best way for me to synthesize new information is to write.
My first lesson with Michael was informative, pleasant, frustrating, irritating, uncomfortable, humbling, and so many other descriptive words. I am deliberately not looking at his website or writings again until after this first entry. I want to write about my experience and observations before being influenced by his writing. After, I will go back and compare and see what I have learned.
My goals:
- Find the light, flexible voice that I know exists in my upper register. When I have experienced it in the past it has been effortless. I want to be able to call on that voice when I choose so that singing at the top of my range is not painful or tense.
- Prepare to audition for professional groups in the Twin Cities.
- Perform with grace and ease during our tour in June.
When I expressed the desire to find this light voice, Michael jumped on the idea and showed me the tiny voice that he uses. The jaw was dropped, cheeks hollowed, and lips pursed in a tiny oo vowel. At the time, I seemed to have no trouble finding this tiny voice, however, I've noticed that I can easily feel tense and tired in the throat, as if the back of my tongue is raising. I have perpetual and chronic sinus issues, so I'm assuming that this tiredness could be the result of the symptoms. I understand what he seeks and the feeling of seeking it correctly, a feeling of hollowness behind the eyes and a shortening and thinning of the length of the vibrating folds. It seems as though his tiny voice is way at the top of his vocal range, while my tiny voice seems to be somewhere short of that. Should my tiny voice be at the top of my vocal range as well? It seems that if I would attempt to move the pitch of that tiny voice any higher it feels pinched and very uncomfortable.
Moving downward:
The next thing we tried was taking the position of that tiny voice, the length and thickness of the folds, and singing at a lower pitch. The idea was to take that efficiency of vocal production and moving it to a solid lower register. I have several problems in doing this. Firstly, the distance that he dropped me was down into my lowest vocal register, feeling very much like my 'chest voice'. Anytime I make a change from a high pitch to a low pitch it is going to feel different. Different does not equal correct, and I cannot tell if I'm making a correct difference or an incorrect difference. I worried that I could very easily practice this and consistently practice it incorrectly, because I cannot determine what 'correctly' feels like. I cannot hear a difference in between how I've always sung a lower pitch and how he had me sing it in lessons. I don't feel as though I've done anything differently. We did this at length during the lesson and I can still not feel any difference. Perhaps I've been doing it in his version of 'correct' all along?
There are two possibilities. The first possibility is that I have been doing what he says is 'correct' all along, which is why I'm having a hard time delineating between the 'old way' and the 'new way'. There is no difference, and I really need to stop over-thinking this. I'm getting frustrated for no valid reason, because I'm already doing it correctly.
The second possibility is that I am completely clueless. If this is the case, then I have no tactile memory and my frustration is only beginning. If this is the case, Michael needs to point at me and say, "There!!" when I do it correctly, and needs to keep doing that until I can feel and identify the difference.
Glottal attack:
I understand this and don't have any difficulty reproducing the glottal attack at the beginning of tonal production. The only time I screwed this up, it was due to paying attention to other aspects that I simply overlooked it.
Breathing:
During the lesson, I was very frustrated and upset, however, I don't think that Michael and I are as far apart philosophically as I thought at the time. I understood that Michael wanted me to breath normally and allow the diaphragm to release in a natural manner as I was using the breath. The amount of breath that was needed for the exercise was next to none, and we were specifically trying to concentrate on the vocal production mechanism. I'm hoping that he just wanted to deal with one variable of air pressure at one time.
I believe that the singer's breath has one function and that is a function of time. It is ultimately the amount of fuel that's in the singer's tank. The amount of breath that you can hold determines the length of phrases that you can sing. That being said, I believe that there are two things that regulate how that breath is used that can increase or decrease the amount of time you have available. The first factor in regulating breath usage is the vocal producing mechanism itself. The second factor is in the way that you control the diaphragm muscle.
A river during a spring melt is a good metaphor for how I visualize the breath works. At the top of a mountain is a large snow pack that is melting in the spring. That snow pack represents the total amount of water that the river has the potential to release, and is analogous to the total amount of air that the lungs can hold. At the bottom of the river is a narrow channel with river banks rising high on both sides. That channel represents the vocal producing mechanism. The rate of snow melt represents the use of the diaphragm muscle.
A sudden change in the shape or distance between the river banks in that channel would change the output of the river. For example, If a large part of the river bank in the channel would suddenly erode and fall away, the water exiting the channel would rush out and the reservoir of water behind the channel would empty more quickly.
A sudden change in the snow melt would also change the river. If the weather got very cold and the snow stopped melting, the output of the river channel would slow to a trickle. Conversely, if there were several hot days in a row, melting would increase and without a change in the channel below, pressure would build up at the channel and a smaller volume of water would be forced through the channel with more speed. There may even flooding along the upper river banks as the volume in the river increases.
It appeared in our lesson that Michael was telling us to forget about the snow melting, forever. It appeared that he was telling us that you should always leave your diaphragm in a 'natural' state and allow all of the work of controlling air pressure in the lungs to be done by the vocal producing mechanism and none of it to be controlled by resistance in the diaphragm. Now that I think back on it, I think he was simply telling us to forget about the snow melt until we had the river channel figured out. I'm hoping that we can get more clarification of how he feels about this.
Smiling eyes:
The smile (with the eyes, not the mouth) on inhalation is something that I've been acquainted with before. I am rarely able to inhale through my nose when I sing, simply because of sinus problems. I think that even if I can just condition myself to 'think' like I'm inhaling through my nose, while actually inhaling with a mix of both, I will be on the right track. In any case, getting rid of the "turtle neck" look while I'm singing will be an improvement visually. Opening up the large sinus cavity can only aid in finding that voice that I want so badly.
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