Birthday Milestone

A great lesson from Madison made me feel better about growing old. Though I hadn’t taken lessons in ages, I took heart hearing i‘d still improved. Using Range builder and the Mastering Mix workout in the car have paid off! But just so we're clear though i've improved I know I'm still pretty cringe. The main thing we worked on is having the woofy yawn like tone balancing out my mix. It’s so hard finding and blending resonances and then keeping the consistency throughout the song. Certain vowels and words can just jam everything up! 😓 Try try try again!

My life is half spent. How will the rest of it go? Will I finally get to pursue my own goals? Will I reach what I aspire to be? I keep getting interrupted and waiting for my turn. Some interruptions are sweet, others just frustrating. I know these moments will never come back, so each day I do my best to make it a joyful learning one.

I’ve been listening to Lexi Walker’s Inspire album. She’s currently my favorite singer who models almost all I wish from my voice: that resonance permeating Every note, the unaffected naturalness, plus the ability to add colorful distortion at appropriate times. Tasteful, colorful, and authentic.

What seems to really help me change is opening up Smule after a lesson or warmup and just singing anything while listening to my voice and experimenting. Inevitably i'll hear things I don't like in my voice, and sometimes from playing around I figure out how to make them go away. For example, I recently figured out that I am trying too hard sometimes to make my voice do what I want. When I focus on the message of the song and relax things seem to sound a lot better. I also learned that once you find your resonators, you must figure out how to balance them. Only experimentation and lots of singing will yield results. The resonance part is something you must discover, not muscle or force. It either happens or it doesn't. The part you can feel is compression and lowering the larynx. High notes shouldn't be hard when you do them right. The cords should zip up and less air is better. If it hurts you're doing it wrong and stop, as Brett says.

So much of singing is a mind game - a weird mix of conscious control and unconscious art, the perfection of which one may aspire to by first of all Listening - to oneself and to other singers. The more and varied singers you listen to the better. This lesson i've learned from Singing Success challenges. Being a genre purist is very limiting. Find people who are well loved in different genres and Listen carefully. Try to figure out what they are doing that makes people love them and see if you can take anything away from that.

Because I love you guys I will share a cringy recital from 2017. I was preggy at the time. I can't quite put my finger on what makes it cringe, but the element is there, alas. I've done a lot of work on my voice since too. i'll have to make a new recording of this neat song sometime to see how far i've come. At that point in 2017 I'd mostly just done Singing Success in the car, with only a handful of lessons with a human instructor through my church. Weak sauce, but I think i'd be a lot worse was I not faithfully practicing vocal exercises.

Now I need to learn “You light up my life “ as sung by LeeAnn Rimes for a wedding in November. I've never been big on Country music, but I am learning. There's a special resonance she has that makes this relatively simple song showcase her strong voice. Currently it's an enigma to me. I either fall too pharyngeal or too heady. It's the woofy chest I need to blend in, and make that darn larynx stop sneaking up!

I got an assignment too- listen to and learn Wendy Moten’s “Your love is all I know.” I'm so blessed to have met her - she's such a wonderful kind person and a big inspiration! I'm starting to be able to hear a common ingredient in these great singers across the genres, if I can only figure out how to do it!