When someone is beginning to learn how to sing or coming back to singing after a number of years, there are so many moving parts that it can quickly become overwhelming and cause even the most driven of singers to become faint at heart and confused. When a new concept is introduced, we work on it and work on it until we’ve finally mastered it, and in the back of an inexperienced singer’s mind, we think we’ve figured it all out. Until a new concept is introduced. I remember the feeling, for instance, after I had mastered utilizing my face mask, feeling so exhilarated that I had FINALLY figured out how to resonate without pushing…until my teacher began talking about vibrato and how it is important for the sound to resonate but also be free and able to vibrate. Oh, and then there’s that whole balance thing (chiaroscuro)! Ugh!!
I also remember struggling through voice lessons. I began singing at an early age, but most of my early teachers were mainly piano teachers or ladies who sang solos at our church. They weren’t necessarily “voice teachers” who knew the vocal apparatus and how my voice was supposed to function or how to teach me. One of my “voice teachers” was even half deaf, so I have no idea how she even heard me sing — let alone knew how well I was doing. Each of these teachers usually just helped me learn a song and would kindly pat me on the back and tell me I was doing a good job. In high school, I worked with my choir teacher a few times preparing for upcoming solo competitions, but I was never really exposed to vocal pedagogy until I went on to college.
Even in college, at the Conservatory of Music at UMKC in Kansas City, I studied with one very seasoned elderly woman my freshman year and was convinced that everything she said was biblical truth…until she let me go to take on more serious voice majors (since I was a lowly music education major), and I had to find another teacher. I worked with the teacher she referred me to for a year, and then realized I was getting nowhere vocally and switched teachers my junior year to work with the teacher I stayed with for the rest of my undergrad degree. Suffice it to say, each of these teachers had very different and sometimes opposing vocal techniques. I was driven, but I was also highly frustrated with the huge discrepancy in what they were teaching. I knew I had a lot of pieces of a pretty large puzzle, but I didn’t know how they all fit together.
After I graduated with my undergraduate degree in Music Education, I went to study voice at the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria for 8 weeks during the summer of 1999. There, I was exposed to even more teachers and theories on vocal production, breathing and performing. I loved all that I learned and soaked it in like a sponge, but I also realized again just how different various people taught and couldn’t make heads or tails on what I was doing correctly or incorrectly. This experience in Graz led me to pursue a Rotary Scholarship so I could go back to Europe and study with the best teachers the world had to offer (or so I thought). What I quickly realized while there, however, was that these teachers were even more diverse in their approach to singing, and I was, once again, even more confused. I think, by this time, I had studied with roughly 10 teachers in a period of 7 or 8 years. This will do some damage to your psyche and your soul! But I persevered…
After spending a few years studying and singing professionally in Vienna, Austria, I was ready to get serious about my vocal progress and go back to the States to get my master’s in vocal performance. I knew if I was ever to have a career as a singer I needed to sort through all the confusion and make sense of this mumbo jumbo in my head. After getting married to my husband in Vienna in 2004, we decided to move back to the States where I, again, began studying with various voice teachers and pursuing singing as a profession. In 2006, I began my master’s program at the University of Texas at San Antonio with a professor who helped guide me through all the voices in my head and sort out all of the correct and incorrect information I had received over years of studying voice. It was then and only then that I was finally able to put the pieces of the puzzle together and develop a proven technique that was healthy and uh-um anatomically correct. I’ll explain that in a minute…
You see…you don’t have to take voice lessons for long to discover that there is so much nonsense and flat out false information in this profession. Did that statement surprise you? Well, it’s true. There are a lot of phonies and fakes within the “noble profession” of teaching singers, and my goal is to see to it that no one else out there has to experience what I have had to experience as a budding singer. To be brutally honest, because, let’s face it, that’s all I can be…there are wayyyyy too many singers out there who end up becoming teachers, but they have no idea how the voice actually works! It’s so bad that many people tend to refer to the vocal faculty at well-known, renowned music conservatories as the “graveyard for retired singers”. For some reason, you could have absolutely NO background in vocal pedagogy as a teaching professor, but if you happen to have a long resume of solo performances to your credit, you are coveted in the university profession. It’s sad, and there are some exceptions, but it’s true. What’s also true is that these retired singers/now teachers, while well-meaning, are many times still very ego driven, and in my experience, their background and fame and experience outweigh their ability to detect a vocal issue and find a technical way to resolve it. Rather, they talk down to students who aren’t as prolific or perhaps don’t possess the natural ability to sing like they do. How many times have I sat in a lesson I paid good money for listening to how great the teacher was or a story how “back when I sang…we used to…and one time the conductor did this or that…and, well, it looks like our time is up! That’ll be $60!” I realize there are more and more efforts made nowadays to counter this ongoing problem, but in many cases, both at the university level and privately, this issue still remains in full swing!
I realize it may seem I’ve gone off on a tangent and gone into too much detail, but that’s ok. I hope I’ve helped you understand who I am and what I have gone through as a singer so you can learn from some of my misfortune. I’m here to make that journey with you and help you become your greatest you! And if I have to share some not so amazing things in order to accomplish that, it’s fine with me!
So…(big sigh) after going through all of that over a period of roughly 10 years, I came out on the other side with 10 Rs for Successful Singing. That’s right! I’ve complied an easy go-to checklist to help you stay on track as a singer and not get caught up in how to manage all the moving parts simultaneously. I go into these 10 Rs in detail in my Unveil My Voice course which will launch this September 2017, but because you took the time to read this long post (poor you!), I have included a little cheat sheet here and will dive into it over the course of a series of blog posts.
Thanks so much for stopping by and being a part of this amazing community of like-minded singers! I hope you take the time to subscribe to this blog so you can continue receiving information.
xoxo,
Amy
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