Whoops, I should have waited two seconds for mike's response to come through...
[about students listening to their studio lessons and not understanding how they'll sound outside the studio]
> i doubt most students make that distinction.
Surely they must! If you aren't listening to your lesson tapes specifically for certain sounds and concepts, then what's the point? If I'm listening to my lessons because we're working on squillo, then I learn to recognize that sound and remember that feeling when the teacher says, "Yes" -- even if that moment doesn't sound so hot on the tape. This is part of the necessary trust between teacher and student -- you trust the teacher's ears, and you go for the sound they want, even if it sounds slightly off in a small room. Good teachers tell their students this, too: "YES! That's exactly the right sound. It might sound a little shrill to you on the tape, but that's what I want you to go for -- that's the sound that will cut through an orchestra."
A good teacher's ears will listen for the big-house sound and teach that technique, despite a small studio; a good student will put aside the initial "but I don't sound like Diskau on my lesson tapes" dismay and use the tapes as a learning tool, rather than an enjoyable listening experience.
> for most singers, the experience is the small > studio. for the singers > you are claiming to have adversly affected their > voices by recording, their > experience includes the larger stages for more of > their singing than any other singers.
Yes, but singers KNOW about this difference. They sing differently in a studio than they do in a house. Listen to any current coloratura's recordings and then go see her in a big theater -- the production is amazingly different. Big-name singers with big recording contracts and savvy agents make a LOT of adjustments when they go into the studio.
Remember, the days of planting Tetrazzini in front of a horn and giving her one cylinder to sing her heart out are gone -- the big singers also learn how to sing for the studio, they don't just walk in and run through their rep once. And you can sense what adjustments you might be able to make if you didn't have to worry about being heard, too, when you're hammering out your technique -- you can tell what the compromises both ways are. Especially when your teacher is telling you, "I know you want to sink into that [u] vowel, but it's killing your ring; modify it to [o] in order to be heard over the orchestra."
In houses which are secretly or not-so-secretly miked (like NYCO and Berlin, both of which admit it), singers will routinely plant their spouses or friends in the house during rehearsals (often with minidiscs) in order to discover what sorts of adjustments they need to make.
Isabelle B.
===== Isabelle Bracamonte, ibracamonte@y... San Francisco, CA moderator of Vocalist: the mailing list for singers (vocalist-temporary@yahoogroups.com)
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