I receive many questions asking what voice lessons are like.
In brief:

• I will ask you about your singing and musical history, goals, and what you would like to improve in your singing.
• We will start the diagnostic part of the lesson where we determine what vocal tendencies you have.
• I will teach you specific tools to counter-balance the tendencies you have that are causing you vocal problems.
• We will apply those tools and resulting technique to songs.

Each student has very specific needs and vocal tendencies. I tailor each lesson to that specific student’s needs.

Here are some video snippets from an actual voice lesson to give you an idea of what the core of the singing lesson is like.

You could hear that the student had some trouble getting across the first bridge of his voice smoothly. That is the area where the voice has to transition from chest voice to mix. Mix is the middle register of the voice where the primary resonance changes from being below the soft palate to being below and above the soft palate. We call this a split resonance. Most students have difficulty with this transition at first.

Now listen to this:

What you heard the student do is called a lip bubble or lip trill. The lip bubble was a great tool to help this particular student smooth out the bridge between his chest voice and mix and then between his mix and head voice. At the end of this video I had the student experience the difference between doing a lip bubble with the vowel of “uh” shaped in the mouth behind it and the vowel of “ee” shaped behind it. I wanted him to be aware of how those felt differently and know that it was the feeling of the “uh” vowel behind the lip bubble that he needed so that his larynx would be stable.

Here I used some vowel and consonant combinations with the student to get him closer to actually singing a song. All singers have one or two vowel and consonant combos that work best for them-that help them keep their larynx stable, their vocal cords sufficiently compressed, and an appropriate amount of air flowing. The “noo” sound in the above video was this student’s “best” vowel and consonant combination. It helped him become familiar with the feeling of a relaxed and stable larynx.

In this last video we began the work of application of technique to a song. I used a couple of the vowel and consonant combinations that worked well for him earlier in the lesson to start getting this song into his sensory memory with a stable larynx. And I had him keep his vowels “narrow”.  His tendency was to widen his vowels in the approach to and in the bridge. We also began to work on vibrato. The change was quite significant, even in this short amount of time.

I hope this helps you know what a lesson can be like, that it will spark some questions about your own voice, about what your tendencies are, and about how you can improve.