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YOUR
REAL VOICE - the vocal ezine for real people
January 4,
2007 #33
FEATURE EDITORIAL
Who
Am I As a Singer?
I've been waiting for this one for years.... one of my students finally
came to me with the PERFECT problem. Reyna, a soprano with a big,
gorgeous voice and a ton of singing talent, came into her lesson in
distress. Since childhood, she has sung along with the radio and
learned songs off of CD's from all her favorite singers. I gave
her the assignment to "strip" the famous singer out of her own
voice. This meant Reyna had to sing the same words and notes as
the song on the CD, but all the sounds, meaning her vowels, the
phrasing and her vocal tone, had to be ALL her own and not a copy of
what she heard on the CD. At the start of her next lesson, she
sat down and began talking, not singing.
"I'm ready to give up singing! I'm so frustrated! I don't know what to
sing! What do I sing? Everything I hear myself do is
copying them. What am I supposed to sing? How do I DO
this?" She was obviously stressed and truly upset at how her
singing week had gone and how little progress she felt she had made.
I was jubilant! How I have longed for a student to finally arrive
at the point in their vocal study where they could confront this
one!
This "problem" is GREAT news because what it means is that she is not
stuck on a technical issue, like bad technique or trouble with notes or
straining. It's not a musical problem. It's an ARTISTIC
problem! YEAH!!!!.. Why I call it the "perfect" problem is
that she is standing on the edge of her "known" world, ready to peak
over that edge and have a look at who she REALLY is as a singer.
Remember, the assignment was that she absolutely could not copy the
singer she heard on the CD.
This is my favorite issue to help people unknot for themselves in their
musical study! I've said it before here in YRV, but it's
important to repeat it: we all start out as FANS. We become
musicians because of music we've already heard and loved.
Something moved and touched us deeply, and we want to do THAT thing
because it makes us feel so good. The problem for most of us it
that copying leaves us never quite feeling fully artistically
satisfied. The double-dread problem for singers is that copying
is DANGEROUS for our instrument. Anytime we copy another singer,
we are working against our anatomy. To copy the sound of another
singer requires making alterations to our own natural sound, and that's
bad news. Reyna had never heard herself sing in her own voice
because in her head, she heard the other singer she was copying.
As soon as I took that other singer away and she could not copy, in her
experience, there was no one there!
She is finally free to CREATE, rather than imitate. For the first
time, she is beginning to listen to her own voice within. She is
no longer singing on autopilot. Rather than imitate, she can
communicate and really tap into singing what SHE feels, not copy the
feeling of another singer. She has to go within and create her
voice from herself, from where she is touched and moved deeply by
something. Now, after years of practice and study, she is free to
do what she originally started out wanting to do all those years
ago.
So the practice assignment for this issue is to "strip" any other
singers you've got in your head OUT of your voice! If you have
questions about this article, please email us at info@sing-in-tune.com
YOUR
REAL VOICE is the best vocal e-zine for real people! It is a
FREE
biweekly newsletter that is jam-packed with hot stuff on all
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Contact Athena by e-mail at info@sing-in-tune.com
or learn how to sing
perfectly in tune at her web site at www.Sing-In-Tune.com
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