Greetings Vocalisters,
how do you go about explaining the "light mechanism" action of the head voice to young female singers? I seem to have run into a brick wall in trying to explain it in technical terms, short of explaining in terms of sensations and the limited "scientific" vocabulary that I am familiar with. I'm obviously missing something. We have worked with using the siren exercise along with vocalising scales and arpeggi on "vvvv" and "ng" sounds to get that lighter, pointy, smaller, less weighty sound when flipping into the head voice, and it seems to work for the most part in giving them an idea of the quality and differences between the chest and head voice, but when it comes time to translate that into general vocalises or songs- it seems that the subtle adjustments don't happen and the tendency is to "go for broke", and just go for those higher notes and squawk them out an any cost. In a recent lesson with a young lady, we worked on not taking the chest voice up too high (we've spoken about the passaggi and registration) and I'd ask her to lighten up the sound alla the "vv' exercises- and all that seemed to accomplish was more throat tension and frustration in her efforts to *try* to make the sound smaller, rather than letting it happen, kind of pushing that elephant through a tiny doorway.... (I did manage to get a little chuckle from her on this one!) Also, getting her to sing in the area of a4-f5 (top of the staff line) is really difficult and fraught with tension from bringing up the chest voice too high, and singing too heavily...
How is it that you explain this head voice thing to your female students? How do your get them to get the head voice out of the throat, and get that lovely "spinning" sensation?? What explanations have you used that have caused light bulbs to go on... and stay on? I'm feeling stuck and am at a loss in finding other ways of further explaining this *enigma"* that will make a connection with them... Any advice, personal experiences, ideas, benefits of your wisdom would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks-
Virginia
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