How it Works
Voice: I use a selection of singing exercises strategically tairored to each student to work on chest, head voice and mix. I've trained in multiple contemporary vocal methods and I've been teaching singing exercises for over 15 years now. I find that most beginners benefit from incorporating the body and brain drills with singing exercises, whilst advanced students can benefit more from applying body and brain drills directly to songs.
Body: You sing with your body - there are over 60 different muscles involved in singing! - so the better these muscles move, the better your voice works. I teach a range of mobility, posture, strength, tension release and muscle mapping exercises based on each student's history, my observations of their body and performing different body assessments.
Brain: Neuro what now? The actual term is "Functional Applied Neurology" which basically means knowing which parts of the brain do what, how different parts of the body and brain work together, how the different systems in the body work, and applying all this knowledge to improve movement and performance.
Your brain controls everything that you do and your brain is wired for survival, not performance. Your brain doesn't care if you sing well. It is literally asking every second "is it safe?" and protecting you from dying. There haven't been any hardware changes since caveman era. You need to know how to work with your brain and not against it.
The neuroscience behind it can he complicated but fortunately you don't need to know all that! I need to know it so that I can effectively choose the right exercises to give you those breakthroughs! I've given some examples below.
Example 1.
The Neurology: Knowing the 12 nerves that connect directly to the brain (all the other's go through the spine), where they go, what they control and how to assess, activate, stretch and contract them. Knowing that "sensory feeds motor" so you can't use a part of your body effectively if your brain can't feel it.
Practical Application: Jane is practicing mixed voice exercises but her voice keeps either straining in chest or flipping in to falsetto. In testing we discover that the nerve controlling sensation in the part of Jane's face where the resonance for mixed voice lives, is really dull and under active. Jane learns exercises to activate this nerve and when she redoes her mixed voice exercises after, suddenly she discovers her mixed voice like never before.
Example 2.
The Neurology: Understanding "sensory motor amnesia" which means that your brain can forget how to use a part of the body or muscle if it's one that you don't use often through it's full range of motion. Knowing how to map body parts.
Practical Application: Adrien has a really hard time developing his chest voice. Despite doing chest voice exercises, his voice is still not very powerful or stable. We assess his breathing and do some body mapping exercises for his external obliques. Suddenly, BAM he sings in a deeper, more stable chest voice than ever before as his breathing and support just got a major upgrade.
Example 3.
The Neurology: Knowing that the vestibular system is a "high priority" system i.e. super important, for the brain - it is what keeps us from falling over and the brain is very concerned about not falling over as this could lead to serious injury or death! Every time the brain is stressed about one of it's systems not working at 100%, it restricts all our movement - and singing is movement - because it thinks that if you move less, you will be safer.
Practical Application: Sam's high notes are tight and take a lot of effort to hit. Some days it's better and some days worse. After seeing in Sam's history form that he gets motion sickness, we work with his vestibular system and afterwards his high notes are more free and effortless than ever before because his brain is less stressed about falling over (and dying..because yes, I'll say it again, the brain is obsessed with minimising your chances of dying :) ).
