Practice 10/2/16

Today I caught up on my sleep and did a lot of my homework! Woohoo! I also went grocery shopping yesterday, so I actually have food in my house! It's a good day.

So, I took some good notes from yesterday's Master Classes with Karilyn Johnson, and a lot of what she said helped me to find release again. I've been struggling with a) finding the edge of my voice, and b) finding the upper space and releasing the soft palate to allow the resonance to move up without any help from the jaw.

I followed along with my lesson from 9/11/16, and I decided to try out putting my thumbs underneath my back top molars and pushing them up as far as I could and singing into that space. It. Totally. Worked. I've been struggling with my vibrato and finding that upper space, and it's been making my vibrato beat-y and heavy, and it feels like any sort of pitch change is a huge excursion in the larynx. But it was also super confusing, because I felt like I was doing everything as I was supposed to, and something just wasn't working.

As I was following with my lesson, I used my thumb to rest the knuckle against the bottom row of teeth and the top pad of the thumb behind the top teeth. That sort of worked, but it just wasn't enough. I then got the idea to experiment with stretching the back molars even further (MUCH more) than what I thought I needed by putting my thumbs behind the molars themselves. Something just let go, and my vibrato evened out, it was easier to sing on the edge of my voice, and I felt like I had to make hardly any adjustment to my physical self in order to change pitch. And I'm hitting myself because this sort of exercise has worked miracles before, but I never thought to try it again until now. So there's that. (I'm not a complete failure! Yay!)