Jeanie’s Blog

“Scooping”. Terrible habit. Bad news. Students have to learn to stop this, unless, of course, they sing some “popular” styles in which case maybe some of this is “allowed”. Oh, please. So much nonsense in voice teacher world about this “interesting topic”. Think of “coming down” onto the pitch from “above”. (That’s a good, standard idea.) Think ...

It can be very easy to be seduced by words. People are every day and look at our world! Currently, the buzz words in the voice profession are changing. We are talking about functional training now. It’s suddenly cool. There is as well a great deal of talk about reflux and about harmonic to formant tuning/ratio. Also ...

There are many people in the world who don’t know that they don’t know — about something. All of us start out as innocent babes who have no “intellectual knowledge”. That only comes later. If you consciously choose to develop a specific area of interest, and you are persistent and motivated, you can end up learning ...

Most of us who are artists have the idea that talent (that indefinable something that allows us to be really good at an activity without much effort) is important. If you look around, though, it seems less true than it was in the past that this ingredient is crucial to having a career. I can think ...

My colleague, Jamie Leonhart, is a wonderful singer/songwriter, and has written many interesting and unique tunes. One of my favorites is “Control Freak”. It captures that phrase so well. Go to her website, take a listen…..and buy the song! (www.jamieleonhart.com) I have been accused of being a control freak. It’s not a nice experience having that ...

I have written here before about the classical singers who have large voices and powerful delivery who move over to “non-classical” styles (CCM) and think all that’s involved is “changing the vowels”. This blythe assumption sits under their teaching. Without looking at the default of their own instruments (and they don’t know what a “default” would ...

Whether you like it or not, you will teach from your own skew (angle). If you are a dramatic tenor, you will listen and feel through that filter. Especially if you have never sung anything outside dramatic tenor repertoire, you will teach everyone to be like you, whether you realize it or not, for quite some ...

I have said on this blog many times that the best teachers of anything physical are those who have done that activity. While I can try to imagine that it is possible to teach something you have never done, in the end I can never accept that picture as being valid. I do not believe that you ...

I have never understood why some people are content to be “pretty good”, even at something they profess to be very serious about. I know people who are doing professional musical things who will readily admit that they aren’t particularly good but who do nothing to improve their skills or abilities. They spend their free time ...

Age gives everything a different, more diffused perspective. It makes it easier to tolerate things that seems unacceptable when you are young. It teaches forgiveness and compassion. Things are not always just black and white. When you begin something, unless you are very lucky and have an excellent mentor, you can’t see very far into the ...

What is good singing? Can anyone capture it in words? All kinds of singing can be considered “good” for all kinds of reasons. Certainly, if one applies the thinking of the typical “classical” voice teacher to all styles, then some singing is “more good” than others. Clearly, I do not adhere to that at all in ...

If you have studied any discipline — yoga, baseball, violin, acting — you know that you have to spend time working on that discipline before you become very good at it and even after you are good it takes years to be a master. A master is someone who can deliberately do very difficult things ...

These days things everywhere are looser then they were even 25 years ago. It seems that it’s OK to list things as casually as possible without any degree of correctness just to put some “spin” on them, maybe to enhance who you are or what you do. I am not in this camp, however, and I try ...

There is such a thing as learning to sing step by step. Most singing teachers don’t know which exercises are difficult and which are easy. They don’t know what kinds of things are vocally challenging for everyone and what’s only difficult for certain students. They can’t decide what kind of progress is slow, rapid or ...

What if the sounds you make could be heard by angels? What if they were invisibly there, listening to you? Would that matter to what you were doing? If thought is energy (we know this since it can be measured now with electronic instruments and various kinds of scans), and if energy can neither be created nor destroyed ...