Taylor said:
>Some would argue that a directive aimed at bringing the sound "forward," by
"placing" the voice- CAUSES a good tone to emerge from the larynx. I however,
am in the camp which believes that the sensations of "placement" and
"forward" are the RESULT- not the cause of good tone quality.<
According to my experience, you're ALMOST ABSOLUTELY right! hehe
I've always had teachers who tried to 'place' my voice. They said: put it
forward, behind the upper front teeth or in the mask. Some even said I should
let the air go up into the nasal cavity ( as if they were giving a rather
anatomical description of mask placement ). One told me to go 'feel' the sound
traveling back in the palate as I went higher.
I tried to do all that, I actually FELT those placements,but without any gains
in vocal production and, consequently, I got vocal problems.
Once, WHEN PRACTICING BY MYSELF, I actually found my mix and head voices. It
all made sense to me: YES, I felt the sound forward, and in the mask, and in
the head, and going backward in the palate as I went higher. I could stop the
sound in the middle of the skull ( or of the palate, depending on where I
focused by 'tuning' strategy ) and continue going higher, feeling what is
probably an 'educated' belting ( hehe ) or what SLS calls hard/soft mix.
The point here is: THEY WERE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SENSATIONS FROM THE PLACEMENT
SENSATIONS I USED TO HAVE, ALTHOUGH I MIGHT HAVE DESCRIBED THEM THE VERY SAME
WAY IF I HADN'T EXPERIENCED BOTH KINDS.
So here comes the problem: the teachers were probably describing one thing
while I was feeling something completely different, but our DESCRIPTIONS
matched! When I went back to class I wanted to show that new "singing mode" I
had discovered, but I was so eager to do it that I just couldn't. My teacher
got irritated ( because I had said the exercises we had been doing were
stressing out my larynx, although I couldn't show her my 'revolutionary
discovery' ) and literally 'forced' me to do the class using the 'old habits'.
My muscles just 'forgot' that new tuning mode ( I hadn't been singing the old
way anymore, but the new habits hand't 'calcified' yet ) and now I'm fighting
to recover that.
That was an example of what a 'placement-based' class can do to a student.
Nowadays, whenever I hear about a student fighting to place their voice
somewhere, I wonder how lucky they must be for that to work out. Most say they
want to quit because they were not BORN to sing.
I've never met a 'lucky student' who didn't start classes already with good
'placement' ( and that's what led them to try to start a singing career in the
first palce ), but I've seen MANY students with rather good placement and a
beautiful tone distorting their voices while trying to place them in the
forehead for the higher notes. The literal interpretation of the words 'chest'
and 'head' by teachers is probably the basis for such nonsense: heavy and light
mechanisms, for example, might be advisable 'newspeak' ( if someone can say
something as 'fictitious' ( to say the least ) as Native-American, why not
heavy and light mechanisms... ops...that belongs to our backstage list, isn't
it? hehe ).
bye,
Caio Rossi
Sao Paulo, Brazil
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