Hey you guys. Welcome to The Singing Studio. Today is a review of episodes 12-15. I hope you enjoy! Hey you guys and welcome back to The Singing Studio! Making sure our voice is as strong as it can be takes teamwork. Today we are crossing some bridges. I’m so excited for today’s video!
Episode 12: Crossing Bridges
Today we are going to be talking about our vocal bridge. It is the bridge that is between our chest and our head voice. It’s sort of an awkward place because we’ll crack or we’ll squeak, but our goal with the bridge is to have a smooth and strengthened connection between the two. Sort of like a bridge that you would drive on. You don’t want to drive on a bridge or walk across a bridge that’s crumbling or falling. No! We want to have a good foundation. So these exercises today are going to help us strengthen and smooth that bridge. We’re trying to have good breath support especially when we’re jumping up. Sometimes we can back off or sometimes we may shorten our breath because it is a big leap. My challenge to you is once you flip into that head voice, make sure to keep it. Even if we’re going down lower, and it would be technically in our chest voice that we would sing that certain note, try and keep it in that head voice. That’s not only going to strengthen our head voice, but it’s going to help our bridge smoothen out. We’re trying to slowly smooth this bridge so that we can have a nice connection and less squeaks and cracks. So you can sing this exercise on an “oo” or a “wee” which are a little bit easier vowels to get your voice around and sing up high. But I encourage you to gradually get up to that “ah” in the “la la la la”.
Episode 13: What’s Your Routine?
Today is a little bit different. We’re going to be talking about our vocal routine. So today I’m going to show you how I like to build my vocal routine and hopefully you can build one for yourself. The first thing I do are breath exercises. Breathing, like I’ve said before several times, is the foundation of singing. The next thing I like to do is warm-up my voice. I don’t want to automatically dive right into the more intense exercises, you could say. I want to make sure that my voice is nice and awake. The next thing I do is I go into some full-range exercises. So I go from the lowest part of my voice to the highest part of my voice and from the highest part of my voice to the lowest part of my voice. I like to totally reach the full range of my entire voice. The next thing I work on is my chest voice. I like to go to my chest voice because that is the voice that I am personally most comfortable singing and speaking at. Now that we have really warmed ourselves up I like to go into my head voice. Sometimes I’ll do a couple of sirens before I begin working on my head voice so that way I can remind myself that I’m going to be singing up high and that I need to think nice and forward and open. And last, but certainly not least, I work on my bridge. This is where I love doing slides, specifically the wee slides. I love it because it really just melds everything together that I have worked on that day. Don’t forget to drink water through all of this. I totally forgot to mention this, but make sure you have a water bottle with you at all times while you are practicing.
Episode 14: Theory Factory 2
This is a theory factory video. Today we are talking about rhythm and beat, what the differences are, and examples in some songs. To put it simply, rhythm is the music pattern and beat is the steady pulse. The first example I’m going to sing is “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”. I’m going to clap the beat, but I’m going to sing the rhythm. So here we go. Twinkle, twinkle little star. How I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high. Like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle little star. How I wonder what you are. So the beat was that steady pulse. And the rhythm was -. Beat is that steady pulse. It’s totally constant, but rhythm is the pattern or where the words go. Where they line up with that beat.
Episode 15: Teamwork
So we have our chest voice – that’s our lower register. We have our head voice – that’s our upper register. And in between those two registers we have the bridge. The bridge, if you remember, is a little bit tricky and may be intimidating for some of us because that bridge is where we often crack or squeak. There is that transition between the lower and the higher voices. In order to strengthen our range and make our voice stronger, we need to utilize all three portions of our voice: our chest, our head, and our bridge. We need to utilize these in order to strengthen our range, strengthen our voice and just to have the best sound possible. And that’s what we want. That’s why we take voice lessons, so that we can expand our range and make our vocal abilities more advanced. So I really like this exercise because it moves through our chest voice into our head voice. We obviously go through that bridge.
This exercise, again just like our previous exercise, requires a lot of good breath support so that we can jump those intervals. Also, make sure that you’re nice and relaxed. Don’t strain anything. If you find yourself going up the scale and it’s getting a little too high, make sure that you come back down. Go at your range that’s most comfortable for you. The worst thing that we can do as we are transitioning from our chest voice to our head voice is backing off. Again, like I’ve talked about at the beginning of this video, it takes a lot of teamwork between our chest, head voice, and bridge to really help smooth out our range.
I do these videos every other week, but if you still want more musical theatre, check out my newsletter! It’s called “Beyond The Score”, and it just takes a closer look at musical theatre history. You can find that at jskstories.com.