Why Voice - The Case Study Series

I wanted to share some case studies - most of them success stories on how singing lessons has helped a variety of people over the last few years. 

I teach voice to all levels of and in a variety of forms. From the professional singer/actor/musician to business men and woman, house wifes, school children and college students. Every shape of human that comes through my door gets treated like an individual with a unique set of challenges, but still you can probably find you have something in common with most of them.

Here comes case study #1 - Turning the lights back on.

A lot of people have fears around the use of their voice. Why those fears have arisen I tend not to focus on, that seems to me to be a therapists job. However, the "how to change" the fear, the voice, the attitude, the emotional toll, is my job. If you grew up singing, was considered a good singer with "talent", but somehow screwed it up, the "how to" becomes about turning the lights back on. Whats the most important tool: patience and trust...

In this first case study I am talking about a young man who has aspirations to be a contemporary counter tenor (sings in what is normally considered a female range). A voice type that is considered rare and extraordinary and definitely requires a mindset of a certain splendor, because when you open your mounth you are not going to sound the way people necessarily expect - but if you are good you blow us ALL away. 

He came to me in pretty bad shape mentally, physically and emotionally. I started out approaching the physical part first - talking singing technique and getting in good breathing shape. Singing, especially like a counter tenor is an athletic event, and his body was not ready for what he potentially can and want to do. When that happens and especially when you have tried being in shape for it, you expect to be able to do it - like riding a bike. Only this should be compared with riding a bike up a steep steep hill  for a couple of miles; it requires endurance, strength, stamina and a functioning bike.

Once the three dimensional breathing had started to be automatic, his mental state seemed to be nexts point of order. Getting behind the motivation to keep practicing when you don't want to 'cause it all seems so up-hill ....This was a very difficult stage for this particular student and he took a few weeks break from classes to work on it, I recommend a few books on the subject and we talked intermittently and he eventually came back with a different mindset. 

We started a fresh and I modified my approach, took some of the more technical exercises out and did more joyful stuff and more song singing to help even out the tough parts. Emotionally we have had many discussions about why being a singer is so important to him, and I think he is slowly coming around to singing without trying to prove to me he can do it, projecting on to me his need for his own approval. Everyone who studies with me wants my approval and I gladly give it, sometimes they are however not willing to take the approval I give, for their own reasons.

We have recently turned a corner. He has let go of some of his own expectations of himself, his perfectionism, and now allows me to witness his voice as it is changing into its new form with healthier habits.

Sometimes my knowledge of the voice and how it behaves is less important than my knowledge of human behavior. My own struggles with the voice, life in general and I suppose a general empathy for others and their struggles, are and will probably always be as important as my ability to play the piano, match pitch and explain three dimensional breath support:-)

Why Voice #15 - Being Uncomfortable

                It's not a secret, my students and clients inspire me, and yet somehow it feels a little unacceptable that I learn from my students and clients about as much as I teach and guide them, never the less - that's how it is!

I have been away from the blogger sphere for a while, working on my debut solo album thats releasing in two weeks on April 8th - follow developments on that at www.anettenorgaard.com - ...but I am not going to talk about that today.:-)

I think it's fair to say that teaching anybody anything is a bit of an endeavour, and teaching people how to use there voice not just correctly, but in a way that communicates who they are and what they think and feel is....well, I dare say impossible! So how do I do it! The answer is - I don't teach as much as I create a space in which the student and client can learn. I have a lot of knowledge about the voice and how it works in our efforts to communicate, and I have struggled probably through every single voice problem you can imagine, so most of all, I am standing in that learning space with the student asking them to explore some new sometimes uncomfortable, territory with me. 

            Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't and in my classroom both of those are equally valid. In the beginning, I am mostly there to giude the process by pointing out what works and what doesn't, but most of all my job persists in teaching people to take a risk, fail and be uncomfortably vunerable and courageous with their voice. I do pass on knowledge, it is part of it, but mostly I find, I pass on courage, willingness to fail and the ability to think of your voice as a shaped, learned part of your identity - not the unchangeable box of tricks you somehow were given at birth and what you by your life have been conditioned to be.

              Recently I have had more corporate speech clients who are in need of a similar skill. The ability to make your voice sound authentic, professional and authorative is highly in demand. As we can now get facts and knowledge on most anything via google and other technology platforms, the ability of communicating your knowledge and your opinion on it, seems to be ever more important. How do you seem trust worthy, reliable and honest? It's interesting to approach voice quality and voice work from this perspective, and I dare say that some of these clients who come to me from corporate environments, are a little (read very) uncomfortable with the constant failing and risk taking it takes to learn in my classroom, but to their credit they soon get the hang of it - and once your daring goes up, your learning curve goes up with it.

               To all that human and gentle bravery - I salute you!

Why Voice #14 - How voice lessons make you a better listener

A voice and speech student came into a lesson today and proclaimed that not only did he now speak more with other people, but also he now felt he could actually connect better to people and better understand not only the words they were saying, but also the meaning behind their words. 

I want to talk a little bit about why the statement didn't surprise me. When you work with your voice you should be spending a lot of time listening. Listening to how other people sound, if it is speech as it was in this case, you listen to people and try to figure out what you like about their voice? Are they making the sounds right or wrong? Do they have tention in jaw and tongue? Is breath flowing freely? Do I want to sound like this? Does their voice give them authority or not? And an array of other things you learn to listen for because I in your lessons, make you listen to your own voice in this maner. It's not about judging, but more a matter of curiosity. Think of yourself as a scientist trying to figure out the mechanisms of the human voice - maybe (hopefully) you will remove some judgement from the sound of your own voice...which actually will make you a better voice user on its own, nice right?!

In terms of the singing voice the principles are the same except you listen to music and more specifically, singers instead. Which singers do you like? What sounds do they make? Can I imitate what they do? What is the quality of their voice like? What do I like about it? What do I dislike about it? And so on....

I might seem like the simplest thing - and subconsciously you are already doing this - but if you can bring it to your conscious learning you will improve your own voice so much faster...

Is it fun? I don't know, but if you are one of those people who doesn't like the singing of scale after scale vocalizing from dusk till dawn, it sure beats that approach:-)....all you have to do is listen, maybe test it on your own voice and listen some more....then you come to your lesson and maybe I can answer a question you have - or maybe ask another one...

Being a great listener is rule number one of being a good voice user - it's as simple as that!

 

Why Voice #13 - The Constant Experiment

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better". (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Today I wanna share with you why I have the best job in the world....or at least why I think it is:-)

As I have mentioned a few times already in this blog; singing is a new thing everyday. As you get better the level of consistency gets better, but really just like you body feels slightly different every day, so does your voice. I didn't use to think that it was a gift - more like a curse in fact, but now that I teach and thus am "forced" to sing and make others do it for hours on end, it has become an absolute blessing.

Teaching in it self is one long experiment. My students teach me something new about the voice and how individually we perceive it, almost every day! The constant experiment means that I am never bored, always challenged and hopefully my students are too in our common search for greater mastery of our common, yet individual instrument. We all have one - a voice - and more or less we all use it, but we are all utterly unique in doing so. The voice is like a fingerprint that you can fiddle with, but somehow it still remains totally and completely, singularly yours. No one can ever steal or have your instrument ever! But it can be destroyed...something I have experienced first hand, and on some of the clients that I work with that have damaged voices - it's another matter all together. Building your voice back, finding it again, is like looking for your souls fingerprint in a sense, and can needless to say, be a difficult endeavor, but I believe never an impossible one. As a matter of fact I am the singing example of how a voice can be rebuild, rediscovered and re-found:-)

The voice has an outstanding ability to make us feel special and unique and yet somehow still connected to the whole - that is what I spend my life experimenting with and that my friends is pure unadulterated fun!

Why Voice #12 - Grit

Today I watched a TED talk that confirmed what I have known for years and which is proven to me every day with my students and clients in the process of getting the voice they want.

 

Basically all research on who becomes successful show that the one thing that is most important to have to become successful is....GRIT, meaning as Angela Lee Duckworth put it in the TED Talk; looking at life as a marathon not a sprit by having stamina and perseverance. It is actually not about IQ, talent, social intelligence or income, but about whether you keep at it. 

Unfortunately there is very little knowledge on how you get this grit, or how you motivate someone to have it and she does acknowledge that as a great issue, one route that her research has shown though is, that when you show a kid pictures of the brain and how it is used during different tasks, and that you can learn and change one little step at a time, their chances of getting grit is higher. That when we believe in change and perseverance and not that IQ or other factors decide our fate we CAN succeed, if we work at it.

From where I sit with my instrument and what playing it has taught me about life, I will dare to say that one way of teaching and motivating kids and adults to have grit, is to teach them how to play an instument - anyone will do. Knowing that practice will make you better at something IS grit. And the cool thing is that it might even be fun and maybe even spead a little joy:-)

Why Voice #11 - Balance

It seems to me that one of the great issues of how to get the voice you want rather than the one you think you were given, has a lot to do with balance.

Most of my clients come to me wanting to sound like Adele, Alicia Keys, Pink and other big names from the current popular music scene, and I enjoy teaching them that so we end up having a lot if fun imitating some if the great artists out there - time spent trying to figure out how the stars make different sounds is really fun! 

Clients will however usually already have a strategy in place for making the sound which may be close or not, but none the less EVERYONE that comes in already think that they have done all they can to sound like whomever they like, and that their particular voice just can't do any more.

This is where I come into the picture. I don't know why this is, but usually the client will have picked one or two aspects of the voice to copy and imitate (usually the one that comes easy), and will have neglected the "other" aspects. For example; in singing Alicia Keys the bottom notes and the darker quality of her sound is well developed, and the higher more cry like sounds completely neglected. Either this happens because the singer doesn't hear that in the sound, or there is some kind of resistance toward that part of the sound (more often than not from the idea that the sound is "ugly") So the balance is off from the get go because the client is only imitating parts of the sound, and neglecting other parts that they usually subconsciously find ugly, or have other reasons to block out.  

As I start picking apart the voice, as the voice mechanic that I am, to work on the different aspects of the voice separately, a different awareness of the sound quality is established and the balance between the different parts is restored, or obtained. After all parts are picked apart, polished and perfected and we put it back together again, something amazing happens.

It's a fantastic thing to witness when a client after many a struggle finally gets the balance right and sounds so much more like themselves, the BEST version that is. Without even knowing it - in an attempt to sound like someone else - they end up finding their OWN best voice and it is always an amazing discovery for them - and for me.

My challenge to all the singers out there who are having fun figuring out how to sound like their favorite artist. Listen to them again and try to see if you can hear a new different aspect of their voice - a different side that you didn't notice before - then try to imitate them again and you might have learned something new...about the artist and about your self.

  

Why Voice? #10 - Inspiration - where does it come from?

To those few whom I have not already informed of my latest project - my very own album, with my very own music, at this point in time named "A North Node"... well, thats it, now everyone should be informed. 

I am very excited about the whole thing so therefore probably most everybody are informed already as I simply can't seem to shut up about the whole thing, and thus I am bringing it on to my blog about voice. And there are some great discoveries to be had about the voice in a recording studio.

At this stage of album making it's all about patience as far as I can tell. I have the songs, I know how I want it to sound, and then you have to somehow get it down on some tracks in the studio which is highly time consuming and rather mind-bogging as you can do some really surreal things to your "sound" in the studio.

One thing you discover about your voice - usually very quickly - is that it isn't doing what you want it to do. Not unlike a performance situation, being in the studio can be nerve racking and everything you thought you knew how to do in your sleep, is now the hardest thing in the world. It doesn't help to tell yourself that you can just do it again - somehow that actually makes it worse - I am no expert on the psycology behind this phenomena, but I like to say to my students that it's about being scared of your own excitement and potential (now I try to tell myself the same thing:-). Too many options and too much joy (yes, I know it sounds crazy) it's sort of like tears of joy, a really, really, weird, good feeling of overwhelm, can mess you up as well as anything.

Song is to a large degree about controlling or managing your breath flow. When we are excited or scared or in otherways emotionally on a high note, that becomes a really hard thing to do, also in a recording studio even if you can "always just do it again". 

Going to the studio certainly makes you aware of your shortcomings and your greatness too, and can be a great learning experience even if you are not going to release an album and just want to challenge yourself.