1) Your nervousness to some extent is directly proportional to your confidence in your technique. As your technique improves, your nervousness will reduce.
2) Instead of trying to "drop your jaw", try instead to "unhinge" your jaw. Start by figuring out where the hinge is: Put your fingers right in front of your ears, just at the little indentation - when you lower your chin, this indentation will widen. Now, leaving your fingers there, try lowering your chin down towards your neck. Open and close it very quickly, to get a sense of freedom in the opening/closing movement. I call this freedom "floppy jaw".
3) Close your mouth again. Now, without opening your lips, LIFT your upper molars off of your lower molars. You should feel this LIFT at the sides of your skull above your ears, and even in your eyebrows. This is what you want to feel. With your upper teeth in this lifted position, again push the chin down towards your neck WITHOUT TENSING YOUR TONGUE AT ALL. Keep the "lift" feeling and do the floppy jaw, open close exercise. The tip of your tongue should be behind the lower teeth. The middle of the tongue might lift up slightly. If you look in the mirror, you'll look a bit like an idiot.
4) Close your mouth again. Make an "o" shape with your lips, then "fan" the lips out and forward (think "fish lips"), so the lips become a kind of mini-megaphone. If your lips are in this position, it will be impossible for the root of your tongue to tense and your jaw to clench. Just practise vocalising on vowels that you can sing in that "forward O lips" mouth shape (think tall ellipse, rather than circle, when you think "O"). The sounds you'll be able to make with only very small adjustments to the tongue position are:
Italian: open and closed "o" French: "oe" (and in "coeur") English: "aw" (as in "paw")
Work on keeping the lips extended even when you close your mouth. If you do this, you may notice that your upper molars automatically "lift" off the lower molars. It's impossible to extend the lips and clench your teeth at the same time.
5) With the "O" lips and lifted molars, now do "floppy jaw". You can vocalise when you do this: start with a monotone "buh-buh-buh-buh-buh" very fast, as your lips open and close because of your jaw lowering and rising. Then try singing a 5-note descending scale on "buh": concentrate on how everything FEELS - make sure the upper molars remain lifted off the lower ones, and that the lips remain extended forward ("fishy"), and that the jaw moves easily (floppily), and that the tip of the tongue remains behind the lower front teeth.
6) Now play with some different vowel sounds while doing the exercise in (5). First try the vowel sounds I listed in (4). Once you can do all of these with floppy jaw, fishy lips, and lifted upper molars, you can experiment with more closed vowels: Italian i and u. The trick is to create the "i" ONLY by raising the middle of the tongue (the part underneath your soft palate). NOTHING ELSE CHANGES: The lips are still forward, the upper molars are still lifted, the jaw is still floppy, the tip of the tongue is still behind the bottom front teeth. Now try starting with the "aw" sound in this position, then change nothing EXCEPT for raising the middle of your tongue: "aw...eee" (think of a donkey: ee-aw, ee-aw). Pay very close attention to the sensations you feel: the molars stay lifted, the lips stay "O", the tip of the tongue stays down, the jaw is still "floppy". Only the middle of the tongue rises and lowers. To turn the "i" into an "u", all you need to do is "tighten" the closure of the forward lips. Try it - nothing else changes: the tongue for "i" and "u" are in exactly the same position, everything else remains the same: only the lips close slightly - think about the drawstring on a bag - for "u" you pull it closed more, for "i" you open it again.
Give these things a try, and ALWAYS stay very aware of the sensations when you know you're doing things right, and when you think you might be "slipping" back into old habits. Also, I strongly suggest you do all this in front of a mirror (wall or hand mirror), so you can be sure your lips are really extending, your chin is really lowering easily, your tongue tip remains down behind the lower teeth. Learn to relate the visual cues with the sensations you feel.
Let me know how you do, if you have questions, want more suggestions, etc.
Karen Mercedes http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html ________________________________ That man is the happiest who is most thoroughly deluded. - Erasmus
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