perfume

It is helpful to think of and use all our senses when we learn to sing and perform. Perhaps one that is sometimes overlooked is our sense of smell.

There are many songs that describe scent particularly of flowers, but let’s explore some other ways we can use our sense of smell to help us.

Read ‘Surprising Facts about your Nose” in this link:

Memory

If you use a certain scent during studying, it may help you remember those facts later. You could try this with learning words and text, to see if it helps you recall the work you did in the practice room.

Resonance

Your nose and sinuses are used to help your resonance. This is why if you have a cold or suffer from hay fever which blocks your sinuses your speaking and singing voice sounds different, or sometimes it feels uncomfortable to make certain sounds that require resonance in the areas that are inflamed/blocked.

Resonance due to emotion

If you take a breath in when you laugh (let’s call this ‘true emotion’), you make sound resonance from different areas than if you are faking a laugh/not happy. Have a little experiment and see what feels different to you?

One way to access these resonance areas/areas that describe joy or love is through scent/imagining smelling a rose or similar. This may help you to act/sound with your voice a certain emotion.

The science says:

‘Spontaneous laughter is often higher in pitch, longer in duration, and shows spectral characteristics that differ from voluntary laughter; voluntary laughter, on the other hand, is more nasal than spontaneous laughter. Perceptually, spontaneous laughter is perceived as more authentic than voluntary laughter, and as more positive and higher in arousal.’

Performance Practise

When you are performing a song or an aria, try to ground and build your character using the senses including sense of smell. Where is your character? What surrounds them?

Are they by a stream with the smell of wet moss?

Are you singing about a flower with a perfume?

Is your character in a hot dusty place?

Anserwing these sorts of questions and deciding on this in advance will help you more easily create a sense of place and setting from which to communicate your poem/emotion of the character.

Putting this into practise: Smell the Rose

One idea often suggested by singing teachers is to imagine you are smelling a beautiful rose before you sing a passage that is very beautiful/shows love/has warm and legato phrasing. The way we breathe in a delicious beautiful smell will open into different areas and therefor resonating areas than when we smell a horrible smell.

Sometimes I suggest a pupil thinks of something they particularly like - sweets, ice-cream, marmite… whatever helps them think of that nice slow breath in and helps change the resonance to colour the voice differently, and communicate the emotion needed.

As always, feel free to comment below and add your experiences of using smell to improve your singing and performance communication.

birds

Birds are a continual fascination and inspiration to us - hardly surprising in music when their birdsong is so admired!

In particular, I’ve found that some people wish to emulate the soaring feeling of a bird in flight in their own singing. They enjoy the feel of ‘soaring’ or floating through the music they are singing, like a bird does. So what is that, and how can we create that in our voices?

“The birds are the opposite of Time...They are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant outpourings of song!””

— Oliver Messiaen

When you see a bird soaring above, floating almost effortlessly above the earth, what are you really seeing?

The bird has flown from a perch on/near the ground, risen to a height where it feels the support of the wind that allows it to stay in the air. The view we have is of no effort, when actually some rather complicated physics and effort has helped the bird get there.

Here are the things I suggest pupils think about and use to achieve this with their voice:

• Mind

• Support

• Breath

• Reduce the feeling of weight or pushing

• Repeat and experiment

• Know where your strong beats/words are, and therefor the lighter beats and words

An inflexible voice that is pushed or feels heavy will not float or feel light. How much ‘play’ and ‘give’ do you have at your disposal? Could you find more?

As ever, if you have questions get in touch below, book in for a lesson, or work with your teacher to discuss some of these and how they work in your voice.

“Birds have always had the ability to bring me out of a dark space and provide relief in bad times.”

— Jason Ward

warm up

Here I am, in my sunglasses, ready to help you warm-up your body and voice to sing. Are you ready to start work?

Here are my top tips for a successful warm-up that will help you sing your best.

1. Schedule

   Begin by scheduling in the time to warm up and practice. Make sure you leave yourself enough time to fit in what you want to achieve - or change your practice goals for that day.

   Make sure you know how many times you want to practise this week, or even just to warm up your voice. Too much or too little will affect your goals and your muscle memory.

2. Prepare your space

   I can't concentrate in an untidy room. Maybe you don’t have this problem - but I like the room to be clean and tidy, so I have as few distractions as possible! This helps create a calm space to work and I always feel more relaxed about my work.

3. How are you?

   Before singing, take a moment to check in with how you feel today. Do you have a headache? Are you getting over a cold? Maybe you ache from exercise? All these things may affect how you will warm up and practice. Make sure you are making realistic and safe goals for the voice you have woken up with and not overdoing it.

4. Stretch, and Connect

   We want our voices to be produced from a warmed-up neutral body that has no tension, pain, pulled muscles, or illness. We want our whole body to feel energised and yet relaxed - so begin with your favourite stretches. Choose a few positions that you may know from yoga or pilates, like roll-downs and Downward Dog to focus your mind and body.

   I ask my students to do the same stretch I do. Reach up to the ceiling and pause, then gently lower your arms back down, feeling your shoulder blades slide down their back. This with a few gentle back rotations really helps me with my shoulder tension. Be aware of your own body and what it needs today.

5. Start at the very beginning

   Be like Maria in The Sound of Music, and begin with gentle exercises of a few notes, before working up to longer and more complicated exercises. The voice should be treated gently.

6. Expand

   Once you have completed the gentle exercises you are ready to expand and sing higher, and lower. You want to warm-up beyond the lowest notes and highest notes of the pieces you are working on in your practise session.

7. Add emotions

   Even though your scales and arpeggios may be without words, experiment with adding emotion and meaning. Sing a scale as though very happy, very sad, angry, in love. Spot how your voice changes. Do you have a favourite emotion? Is the scale easier in one of these emotions than the other?

8. Isolate

   Finally, you might want to take a phrase from your pieces that needs technical work and work on it in isolation from the whole piece.

   Or, you may have a favourite piece/part of a piece you sing really well and you feel helps ground your voice in the right place. You might find it useful singing this before heading into the main part of your practice.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these tips - which do you find useful? As always, feel free to comment below, or share with your friends.

Learn to Sing

In my blog post today I’m going to take you through the benefits of taking singing lessons, and what happens in lessons with me. I’ve rarely met anyone who hasn’t dreamed of having singing lessons or working on their voice - but what do lessons entail? What happens in a lesson when you are a pupil, and what will you gain from lessons?

“The only thing better than singing, is more singing”

— Ella Fitzgerald

Why do people take singing lessons?

There are a number of reasons people take singing lessons, here is a list of some of the main ones I’ve encountered.

• For enjoyment. Singing is enjoyable, and it makes us feel good. Many pupils take lessons simply because they enjoy the chance to sing and make music together. This is something I love sharing with my pupils.

• To improve confidence. Many people feel vulnerable or self-conscious when performing, but lessons can help to give you confidence. Some people use lessons to help them learn and have more confidence to join or audition for choirs, musical theatre groups, sing with their guitar, or to join their local opera or Gilbert and Sullivan groups.

  Sometimes pupils feel more confident presenting and public speaking in their jobs through their practise performing in singing lessons.

• To gain qualifications through exams - school exams or College/University/ABRSM/Trinity/etc exams that progress through grades.

• To learn more about technique. The human voice changes throughout our lives, so even the most experienced singer will continue to work on their technique. Lessons can help to ground your warm-up and practise with up-to-date information and ideas to help you with whatever stage you are at.

• To explore different sounds. We all have the capability to make different sounds with our voices - and make different decisions about how certain phrases or songs should sound to communicate what we want to the audience. In lessons we can explore different sounds and choose which one you would like to use.

• To problem solve. Some pupils have experienced difficulty doing something with their voice, or conquering a certain technique or repertoire. Lessons can help you work towards your goals.

• To work on the performance or repertoire. Having a second person in the room can be useful to give you another perspective on your performance. Your teacher can guide you through portraying a character, showing journey, and making musical choices to ground that portrayal.

What happens in my singing lessons?

• Firstly, I’ll invite a new pupil to sit and we will have a chat. I’ll introduce myself a little, and I ask about your previous experiences learning music (if any), your understanding of music, the body, and reading music, and your goals for lessons. I may make notes to remind myself - for instance if you can read music a little I know you can find your own note to start in your practice. If not, we will find other ways to help you.

• I will ask how your voice feels today, check you have no illness, allergies, or feel tired. All these things may affect our lesson and what we sing together.

• I will sit at the piano because I can play/accompany you for your lesson. Sometimes I use recordings for you to listen to/sing with, but for live performance practise and technical work I prefer using the piano as it gives us more freedom to stop and experiment.

• Warm Up. We will sing a general/easy warm up of several exercises aimed to gently warm up your voice, and introduce the sung sound into our session. I know this can be a nerve-wracking thing for a new pupil (I’ve been there too!) so I will explain that these noises are for ‘play’ and experiment. They are not meant to be judged - in fact that isn't really my job at all!

  I will choose exercises depending on your voice type, how comfortably you are singing in our lesson, and if you mentioned something in your goals you wish to work on.

• We will sing a song. Either you will have brought music to sing together, or I will have music for you to learn. In regular lessons you may work on more than one piece for each lesson. The pieces you are working on will probably contrast - different emotions, different characters, different languages, different historical style etc. This avoids singing with the same style as it makes you sing out-with your comfort zone and make new muscle memory, helping you grow as a singer.

What will I gain from singing lessons?

This will depend entirely on you, and your goals!

• You will enjoy singing with a live accompaniment, learning a song from an unknown piece of music up to performance standard

• You will learn new ways to use technique and your voice to alter the sound you make

• You will learn how to negotiate different phrases to make them sound the way you want them to

• You will learn a variety of repertoire, including songs you may never have heard of before, broadening your knowledge and understanding of your voice

• You will learn to think about the interpretation and performance of your music, and develop your skills as a communicator

• You will become more confident in the sound you make from gaining better understanding of your voice

• You will learn a skill, with many different aspects that shows development and skill attainment. This will give you a sense of achievement and pride, regardless of whether you sit exams or learn for your own enjoyment

• You will learn a skill that you can share with others whether at home, with your friends or family, or taking part in performances

• You will learn the skills of how to use your voice so that you can problem solve technique and work on music yourself

I have a broad experience of teaching and have taught people with different learning styles and approaches, so please let me know if there is anything you would like to share with me about you before your lesson.

I always aim to teach in a way that helps each pupil achieve and succeed in their own goals, and I am open to altering our lessons to help you do this.