The journey of a vocalist can often be hard.
l personally have learned that my own years of confusion were not unique.
Many vocalists spend most of their time as a professional singer wishing that they didn't have to look at their instrument of expression (their voice) too closely.
Many singers I work with feel that there are times when they truly understand why they are singing well, and there are times when they don't understand why their performances are inadequate.
Vocal Instability - A Student's Case One student in particular told me that she found herself making sounds she had not "planned" to make, and while these were not always what she wanted, she was at times pleasantly surprised.
She had days when she felt she could sing forever, and times (sometimes up to three months) when she felt her voice would never fully come back.
Some days she could hit every note in her "natural" range, and other days she was lucky to croak out tones located a little over half her range.
Vocal Range When she started, this student knew that she seemed to have a huge, belting lower end of the range, then about one and a half notes of squeaky noise, followed by a thin, reedy sound at the top end.
She told me once that she knew that she was fortunate in having a good range in the bottom end, since essentially that was all she brought to the table.
But over the years she learned that she could adjust the sounds slightly and suddenly have a kind of bright and powerful sound in that 'reedy' upper register, and could even 'hide' the squeaky noise.
Singing Terminology These valuable histories of my students are incredibly important for me as a vocal coach, since they always encourage me to put some time into work-shopping and to adjusting my teaching methods.
At this period we started to take songs literally apart and "scrutinise" them.
The more I experienced tremendous changes in my students voices, the more I felt the need to create an even extended language of working.
Slowly over the next year I added more new "Singing Teaching Lingo" into my vocal coaching sessions.
I instantly got results which encouraged me to start an additional musical theatre singing class.
During this time I spent quite a bit of time to expand our terminology by simply creating words or phrases to overcome certain vocal problems.
Looking back, I can't stress enough how important terminology can be, and how putting words on often abstract artistic concepts can help to solve vocal problems.
I guess what I want to say is that singing teachers, vocal coaches and arts teachers in general, should not be shy or afraid of creating their own terminology to help students along.
The even more successful way is to integrate your students into that language building process and allow them to be a part of it.
It helped my singing students a great deal.