Practice 3/20/15

I'm feeling pretty discouraged about my voice right now. I woke up feeling pretty gross; I had a very thick film of mucus or something sitting on my voice, and singing has just been hard. Most of it is a resonance problem I think, but I feel like my ability is somehow deteriorating. I'm still deciding if it's because I'm in the process of learning something new or if I'm just in a rut.

Maybe I've been practicing too much lately and I'm just getting frustrated.

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Okay, not gonna lie--I took some time to sit in a corner and calm myself down. I was sort of freaking myself out.

I felt like I was singing through a brick wall or something; my sound production just feels muffled.
So I stopped singing and went through my old Take-Aways and Lesson Summaries to see what I had written that I was perhaps forgetting, and I found some stuff that really helped.

54321. 54321. [gai lai gai, go do go] Experiment with having more of the back teeth apart, especially on the first part of the exercise. Showing more of the front teeth in preparation for the vocalize.

12345678987654321. [a e o e a]. Maintain square feeling in the back of the jaw. Increase the slope of the space (diagonal line from tip of top front teeth to the cheek bones) as you go up in pitch. Let the feeling of stretch be incremental. Think of the progression of going up in pitch as a track that comes towards you and curves up and around at the point of your neck--think of the turn as a wide turn in the pitch... if that makes sense. At a certain, there's an over/up sensation that eventually comes back to you when you get high enough in pitch.

For singing softer: think of the appearance of soft.

Really smiley face position, DIALING "top jaw" into the skull until you can't anymore, in front of the ears. "Ow! That's excessive!"
Puppeteers: Top molars up, lower jaw back and behind the top molars, and pulling lips forward and wrapping around the molars.

Visualization: Sense how you want the song to go before you sing it.

I left the practice room feeling a lot less stressed out. I knew there was something that I was forgetting to do, and I'm super grateful that we do these lesson summaries and stuff. I never would've figured it out otherwise.