Jeanie’s Blog

Your voice is only as powerful as you allow it to be. You have to look not only at how you sound, but what you do with how you sound, and what you think about that. You have to give some thought to the impact your voice has in the world, in the minds of ...

Wouldn’t it be great if we could really get inside someone’s head and transfer what we know, like a Vulcan mind meld? It surely would save a lot of time! There have been some truly brilliant minds in history and it certainly would have been a great blessing to have been able to transfer the ...

We don’t know how the great singers of the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries sounded. There are some writings about them and musicologists think they have figured out what the sounds were like. They have decided that certain things about music from those times are stylistically correct and others are not, based on what ...

I have recently been diagnosed with a vocal fold weakness. I noticed it because my voice began acting erratically in April and just wouldn’t “behave” no matter what I did. I sang at a benefit, two operetta pieces, and had almost no sound when I came in on A440. I subsequently went to my good friend, ...

Why are there so many folks who teach who sound lousy themselves? What’s up with that? Shouldn’t a teacher of singing have found a way to sound good? I guess not. There are plenty of people who can present a good argument that you don’t have to sing yourself to teach others to sound good. I ...

I heard today that some teachers of singing are “strongly against” certification of teachers of singing and of the idea of trademarked approaches or branded methods of teaching singing. My, my! What can we do??? Certainly, trademarking is harmful. It makes the people who are not trademarked look bad and hurts them and interferes with their ability ...

I was at a dinner over the weekend with several people in their 70s. We were discussing how much of what we would consider “general knowledge” is simply not out there in the minds of many young (and not so young) people. We each cited having encountered a sad lack of knowledge of the history ...

Sometimes people are thrown into situations in which they have no experience. For various reasons, sometimes it falls to an individual to deal with something they have not encountered before and have no training to address. Sometimes, particularly if it only involves the person and no one else, and the endeavor isn’t harmful, addressing this ...

Those of us who deal with singing all have opinions about it. I am very opinionated and not afraid to say so. My opinions about singing have been posted here for nearly six years and have not changed much. I am quite clear about what singing is (to me) and what it seems to be ...

If you don’t have any radical techniques or approaches, if you just do reasonable things, you can be quite successful with people who have a nice voice, a decent ear and are motivated to practice. If they are also naturally expressive, you could end up with a person who sings very well. But if you have ...

Thanks to advances in voice science we are learning more and more about “formant tuning”, sometimes also called “resonance strategies”. The idea is that the first formant and the first harmonic can link up to give the sound a “boost” acoustically. The second harmonic and second formant can do something similar. They move around, sometimes ...

How do you develop your intuition? What is intuition? It has been described as “feeling” or a “hunch” or maybe it’s just an inclination to do something. It could be a “sense” of something or an urge. It’s lots of things but hard to define. How do you strengthen it? Are you born with it ...

Something that singing teachers do that is truly detrimental to the profession, and something about which I have written here many times, is label what they do in lessons as if no one else in the world has ever done it before. Seriously, people, there are only so many sounds human beings are capable of making, ...

When I was a child and heard classical singers on the radio or TV, they all sounded alike. I could recognize that they were singing “opera style”, but to me, one voice was just like another. I also knew that Tennessee Ernie Ford sounded different than Dinah Shore (giving away my age here, folks) and ...

It can be exhausting to push against something that is stuck and resistant. Trying to unlock a door that has been rusted shut is tough. It’s easier to let the door stay closed and walk by, not being curious, not caring what’s there. Recently, I heard about a treasure found in India in the basement of a ...