| Dealing
with Weather Q: How do I deal
with temperature extremes or changes in climate?
A: Moisture and time zones are two very important
keys. For me, the worst is flying from Nashville to
the dry air of Phoenix and trying to sing the same
day I arrive. I need at least twenty-four hours to
adjust. Eventually, your body will become more adept
to rapid changes in climate, but in the beginning
of your career I wouldn't recommend booking yourself
in Maine on Monday, Tulsa on Tuesday, and then Orlando
on Thursday. This would be vocal suicide. The more
extreme the climate change the more taxing to the
body. You are a human instrument with good days and
bad days. The longer you travel, the quicker your
body should adjust to travel and change of climate.
In the mean time, get plenty of fluids (about twice
as much as you probably think you need) and some Entertainer's
Secret Throat Spray.
|
Speed
Up Your Trills
I'm working on my R&B/Gospel styling,
but my trills are slow and sloppy. Is there any thing
I can do to speed up my trills?
The first thing we need to do is understand what
trills are (also called licks, runs and turns). A
trill is a scale sung dynamically with crisp delineation,
fast vibrato and a clean attack or onset. In other
words, going from one note to another without slurring
or sliding, because slurring notes together gives
the impression of poor vocal control. On the other
hand, you don't want to add an 'H' sound, a staccato
or glottal stroke (clucking noise) to your vocal line
to achieve separation between notes. This will create
an artificial and artistically unpleasant sound. So
how is note delineation organically achieved? First,
start on an F below middle C for the men or F above
middle C for the women. Now sing up to a G and then
back down. Learn to go back and forth as rapidly as
possible without sliding or losing note distinction
until you feel a 'bounce' between notes. Use a metronome
and start at sixty beats per minute and speed up one
or two bpm at a time while singing eighth notes. Speed
up only as fast as you can while remaining clean in
your note delineation. If you can get to 200 bpm,
then you're up to speed with Mariah Carey and Brian
McKnight. Now you just have to learn to put together
longer patterns of notes within the scales used for
the style you are singing in. These scales are cataloged
in the Singing
Success Program. It's important to understand
that learning is incremental with this. If you only
speed up one beat a day, which is so gradual that
it can hardly be felt, then in less than four months,
you can be at 200 bpm.
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