Lynn Helding Lesson 2/27/17 and Practice 3/3/17

My tongue's default today was pretty released. So I started warm-ups by focusing on breathing and getting the soft palate up.

breathing with the dress on

Lesson 2/26/16 Warm-up ~12 min.

• Stretch up and slowly lower arms while maintaining ribcage suspension 
• lip magnet
• don't overfill with breath
• chomp the apple/rectangle mouth (but watch that your tongue stays horizontally released) 
• "happy" breath
• fingers in dimples to remind molar space and singing in mask
• don't use up your vocal capital unnecessarily 
• tip of tongue

Lesson 2/27/17 Lynn Helding

• 8:00
• equal opening/released in soft palate and in the throat
• "ah ah ah" 5-5-5-5-54321
• approach from above
• about to sneeze in between
• keep soft palate lifted as you descend
• **Vowel comes from the inside. Think the vowel on the inside and it will come out. Don't make the vowel
• **Don't force the vocalize to work. Just let it do its thing. If it's not perfect, it's fine. 
• [fla fle] 5-534-423-312-271. 
• watch the temporal muscle. You want to flex it.
• "Mignon" by Wolf
• "Gold" more open 
• [ka ga ka ga ga] On single pitch 
• prep with about to sneeze
• "kennst" 
• tip of tongue REALLY needs to be against bottom row of teeth
• It's never just one thing; jaw and tongue and abdominal release and etc. etc. etc. 
• soft palate: 
• [a] [e] [a] 5-5-5-5-54321
• "Una voce poco fa" 
• It's never an "all or nothing thing." We can make adjustments. 
• happy, quiet/sneezy
• practice your strategy an octave down.
• best vowel around G# is [a] 
• Millimeters (in the soft palate and tongue) make a huge difference!
• Trust that the sound will be focused and full; don't force it with the tongue or breath. 

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Update:

I was in a really good place by the end of my practice, and it felt like my soft palate was miles up into my skull (in a good way), and everything just felt really easy. Since everything felt really released, later that night, I decided to try my hand in CCM again (in stark isolation, of course), and I decided to look up different singers and take a look at their belting techniques. (i.e. Charice) 

I also remembered Rebecca saying something about how Lynn Helding said that CCM requires a slightly lowered back tongue position, so I experimented with that, all the while maintaining the nice soft palate lift that I had managed to get before. I found a sound that I really liked and felt pretty healthy. It definitely felt like speech or shouting, depending on where in my range it was, but it wasn't exhausting on the voice at all. 

Some comparisons to classical singing:

• CCM definitely has a bit of a lower tongue. The back of the tongue isn't touching the top back molars, unlike classical singing. 
• There is more subglottal breath pressure (more noticeable in upper range), but I really didn't notice until I tried to return to classical technique. 
• In order to access the different harmonics in CCM, I feel like I had to open my mouth a lot wider than I would in classical singing for "higher" pitches. (This is something that I observed in the videos that I watched with healthy belters.) 
• Again, just a small difference in the height of the soft palate makes a huge acoustic difference for both styles. 
• Now, this is going to sound weird: In classical singing, it feels like there's a small ball of space that sits just below the "hump" of the hard palate and just behind the front top teeth. In CCM, it felt like the ball of space was just below the top back molars. This probably has something to do with the lowered tongue position as well. Also, when I was belting, it felt like I was singing out of my top back molars, but the sound was coming out the front of my face because of the resonance.