Breaking in a new Voice Teacher

At some point, I will talk about last year's adventures in voice lessons. Right now, I am really pleased with my voice teacher from this semester and want to rave about her. Emily is a senior voice student at West Virginia University and carries herself quite professionally. She had a survey for me to complete on the first day of class to gather info about me and gave me an information sheet that provided her contact details and policies. She is always on time for our lessons (unless the PRT makes her 5 minutes late which is rare). She provided typed up vocal exercises in addition to my song and allows me to digitally record our sessions. I might link to sound bites of the weirder stuff later on.

The song I am working on this semester is All Through the Night. I plan to ask one of my friends if she can help me learn a verse or two of it in Welsh (Cymraeg). I have the lyrics, even a phonetic transcription by someone else. I have the melody down cold now. I love to sing in Irish (Gaelige) and I took a 1 hour workshop in Scottish mouth music from Rhiannon Giddens last summer at Vocal Week. I'm now ready to go p-celtic in addition to my bits of q-celtic.

Some of the fun stuff we do doing our lessons is that I will walk around the room while I am doing a vocal exercise or singing my song. It appears that I need to be distracted from thinking too much about singing. I overanalyze or I get tense or both. She said that sometimes only my hands appear to get tense - that I would make lobster claw shapes with them.

In an early lesson, I would bob my head to different positions for the different notes. Remediation? I had to sing the exercise with my back and head against a wall so that I could feel my head trying to move. Goal? Sing without head bobbing like a robin.

Now, if I can just avoid catching a cold or bronchitis at this weekend's Irish ceili, I'll be set to finish up the semester! I even plan to take a few lessons over the summer to be ready for Augusta's Irish Week and Vocal Week. No lesson this week as Emily has her senior recital on our usual lesson day.