My Vocal Story
I was a young and passionate singer songwriter, dreaming of sharing my songs with the world. But even though I had been musical from a young age and had a high school music scholarship, singing my songs was very difficult.
Singing felt wrong and uncomfortable physically
I had debilitating performance anxiety
I could never trust or know what sound was going to come out of my mouth
I had no power or stability
My speaking voice and singing voice were two different people.
So of course I took singing lessons. I was committed so I prioritised my disposal income on expensive lessons with high level teachers and I practiced daily. I can’t say that there weren’t improvements, but in the end, even after many years, I still had the same core issues and still couldn’t confidently open my mouth knowing that I could sing well. I remember once asking a teacher “when will I be able to sing well?” and when I went to a hypnotherapy session for performance anxiety, after hearing about my issues with my voice, the hypnotherapist said something along the lines of “you’ve been singing and training for a long time now, either you can sing, or you can’t…just sing!”.
At times I gave up on lessons and singing exercises, resigning myself to being limited with the voice that I had. Inevitably, after frustration and tears during recording sessions, I’d try another teacher, another technique.
Eventually I discovered body and neurologically based methods like The Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais. Shifts started to happen and I started to understand how the body was important to the voice, but my singing still wasn’t “there”. It wasn’t until discovering the work of Andrew Byrne, creator of The Singing Athlete and the brain-based training that Andrew bases his method on, that I could finally do things that I never could do before with my voice - despite, by that time, over 20 years of training with various teachers. I finally understood what I needed to do, why I hadn’t been able to do it previously, and what I needed to do to make the changes I needed.
By this time, my passion for song-writing and self expression through singing my songs had fizzled out. I had never been interested in singing covers and being “a singer” in this sense. But I had become extremely interested and passionate about experimenting with how doing different things with my body affected my voice and in teaching these drills to others to help them progress faster.
My Teaching Story
About 15 years into my own singing journey, I had the idea to give singing lessons, thinking that I knew quite a bit about it by that stage. Even though I still had my own problems, I figured that I knew enough to teach beginners the basics. The first time that I gave a lesson, I was filled with an immense amount of joy and energy and therefore I began training as a teacher. I started training as an SLS teacher as it was the method that I had been mostly training in at the time, and though I still had a myriad of difficulties with my singing, it had been the method that had made the most difference.
As I began teaching more students, I noticed that some students did really great with the singing exercises and there were noticeable improvements with their singing. Other students left me confused and frustrated. No matter what exercise or scale variation I tried, they had little or no progress. There were certain vocal qualities, necessary for the exercises, or the vocal techniques that some students could not do, no matter the cues, explanations or demonstrations.
I was also being mentored by a high level SLS teacher and sitting in on his lessons was part of my training. I noticed that for some students, this teacher didn’t really make any huge improvements during the session. This was a high level, renowned and expensive teacher! I became very deflated, thinking that maybe some of us just could not be helped and we were fated to sing “badly”. I also became bored with doing endless singing exercises with students, especially when they were making little difference. I felt like I was failing my students if I didn’t give them a noticeable improvement during the lesson, which I also found interesting because when it was myself being the student, I had never thought to blame the teacher for my lack of progress.
Neuro drills not only unlocked my own voice but unlocked my teaching. Instead of trying endless singing exercises, trying to figure out what might work, now I know what will work. I stop. I consider what I’m seeing physically in the student and I ask them for a history - any injuries, pain, accidents? Anything that they find difficult to do with their bodies? I teach them a neuro drill based on all of this information, and then we do the singing exercise again. And this time it works. If they can’t get a certain vocal quality - for instance the nasty, forward resonance sound that we need for mix voice - now I know that there’s something in their bodies that is stopping them from doing that. I don’t waste time trying to find a way for them to do something that they will not be able to do. I find the reason in their nervous system that they can’t do it, and I work on that. Doors open.
