There are many things that make singing different from playing an instrument, but the most profound, is definitely, that all we have to work with is language. There is nothing I can show you, nothing for you to see or touch, just words. Words that can lead you to a sensation that you can label and find your way back to. If just a vocal demonstration was sufficient, why use a teacher? Just use the recording artists and be on your way. But clearly, imitation only gets you so far, and someone’s words will get you the rest of the way.
So, as I said in MUSCLE/Intro1, we are dealing with muscle. And now we see we are dealing with invisible muscle! The external muscles are easy to see and understand even if the work to build them is hard. So we want to hang on to the logic and understanding of exercise and strength training, because although the muscles are not seen and will require a bit more ‘feeling’, the actual exercises are easy. Easy and fun, and they feel good. The reason I have had such a successful teaching career is because it all makes sense. Even when the exercise is weird and the noises you’re making are bizarre, you start to understand the logic behind it by the way it feels. Just like if you’ve ever gotten a correction by a trainer, and although you don’t feel as strong within the correction, you can see how without it, you would be heading down the wrong path. And let’s remember that ‘the wrong path’ muscularly means injury.
I think I mentioned in the homepage video that no one comes to me to show me their beautiful perfect voice. In other words singers seek out information when they are having problems. Even children and parents will enjoy the ‘all natural’, ‘never had a lesson’ crap right up until the fear takes over. I understand it believe me I do. If I sound a little sarcastic about it , it’s meant to desensitize that’s all. Sounding like you’ve had a million voice lessons is not going to help a contemporary singer. That’s it!! I get it. You want to sound so amazingly like yourself and competent that no one will know what you did to get there.
So if we apply what we know about muscle development to our vocal training, we know that we don’t address them all at once. Individual muscle groups do different movements, at different speeds etc.  We should also keep in mind that the musculature should be appropriate to the sport/style /movement of choice.  A line-backer wouldn’t be trying to look like a runner.

I think the biggest fear is that somehow the technique will strip away the originality that made you a singer to begin with, but that’s not true. Technique gives you tools, strength and information to work with as you see fit.  The health and development are in my hands and the artistry remains in yours. You’ve been doing the work all along, and no matter who you get information from, the bulk of the work has to be done on your own anyway. The truth is, I had very few lessons myself. When I was 17, I went for 4 lessons. I worked with those 4 tapes for 13 years and began teaching from them. Now those were some GOOD tapes!!!!! 13 years later, I was having a problem and I went back to Lynda, who said “wow, you got the whole puzzle, except for this one part.” She gave me the missing part, and I had 3 more lessons, and, at her request, stopped referring  clients to her and started my own practice.

DO NOT mistake ‘few lessons’ for ‘minimal work’. I dug in and got what I needed out of that information and they weren’t even geared for that kind of home study. So there, I told you. Less than 10 lessons and I’ve taught thousands.

The reason for the constant muscle reference is that the exercises to develop these muscles are almost all the same no matter what level you are at. In other words the movements themselves tell you where you are at with them. You’ll feel stability and ease in some and not in others , and I talk you through all of them. Just like a good exercise or dance class, you need constant cues . I was honest in the recordings and left many of my imperfections in to show how we all sound the same in process. You will find favorite exercises in every lesson that will last your whole career.

Oh yeah, although my muscular analogies all hold up, remember, the external muscles are huge compared to the muscles in the vocal folds. They take big, heavy, exhausting movements to build. This is fun…. and it’s art, not sport!

Patrick

Tuesday,  November 16, 2010

Monday night is my Advanced Vocal Technique Workshop, and as usual, it was tremendously inspiring!  What continues to dominate these sessions, is the constant reminder that we are all the same, and do all the same involuntary things. No matter how silly they seem in hindsight, at the time, it seemed like the right move!

Try to remember this right before you inhale. Remember that you need to wait for that final release of the chest wall, the settling of the shoulders, and now focus on matching the energy of the piece you are about to sing. Not the energy you’ve imagined is your responsibility!  Try less……just try. I dont mean settle for less, I mean try less and I’ll bet you end up with more.

Vocal Ease – A World Full of Yes

Vocal coach Patrick DeGennaro discusses his technique

Ask Patrick DeGennaro to sum up his technique in a sentence — perhaps not the kindest question to put to any hard-working voice teacher — and he says, “I approach the work muscularly.” Ask him to elaborate and he says much more, often invoking comparisons with dancers and athletes to underscore his stress on muscles and his concomitant emphasis on not stressing muscles.

Vocal coach Patrick DeGennaro

DeGennaro, a performer as well as a voice teacher, gets to his major point immediately, noting that all the muscles with which he’s concerned “are in the vocal folds of the larynx.” More important, it’s the smaller muscles that concern him most. “The missing ingredient is the small-supporting-muscle work,” he says of the problems many singers face. “From the minute the singer inhales, [support] depends on what muscle they’re moving.”

He has an explanation for any literal catch in the throat. He regularly traces it to singing loudly. “By singing loud, they’re ignoring the supporting muscle groups,” he says. Illustrating that loud is called for less than it would seem, DeGennaro — who’s being interviewed over the phone — goes to his piano and plays the opening phrase of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” His point is that the light touch needed to convey the emotion of the familiar piece is akin to the lightness that’s often all that’s required for the beginning — and sometimes the entirety of — a song. Yes, he’s a strong advocate for less is more.

Correctional Work

Mentioning that many singers who get by during their early years singing in what they consider a natural way — and it often is — run into trouble when they hit their 30s, he adds, “Most of my work is correctional.” Along those lines, he divides the troubled into two groups: those with lower registers — belters prominent among them — and those with higher. “The lower-voice types tend to use the voice too high,” he says. “The higher voices have other problems by trying to be belters.”

Although DeGennaro spends much of his time improving a singer’s vocal muscular structure, he’s quick to insist that singing isn’t only about voice quality. About a singer he went to hear one time, he mentions, “One of my friends couldn’t understand that this woman had a beautiful voice but I said she was a terrible singer.” Suggesting there’s a point at which a singer has to put aside classroom work, he says, “The only reason to have a technique is to make an emotional connection.”
This is something to which he gives much thought, because he’s also aware that, for instance, many intimate-room performers he sees use strong stage personalities to excuse careless vocal output. His ideal is “those that do both” — correct singing and exciting presentation. “Vicki Sue Robinson was such an example,” he says, citing a favorite of his. “She had it all going on — not relying on one instead of the other.”

One thing bothering DeGennaro is people who expect him to “wave my magic wand.” He says he doesn’t believe in “the quick fix.” He will allow that “often I can make a change when someone needs just some information.” He holds out little solace for the Broadway singer “out on vocal rest who expects to go back in a week. I can’t help them.” He maintains, however, that he can get them ready “in a couple of solid months.”

The One Who Never Loses His Voice

“I was always singing my whole life,” the New York City-born, Long Island-raised teacher reports. He was 16 when he started studying and credits Lynda Sharman with the solid grounding he acquired then and makes it his business to pass along now. At about that time, he started playing in piano bars. “I was singing 100 songs a night,” he recalls, and compares his stamina to that of waitresses who’d “sing two songs and have to rest.”

They were the ones who got him thinking about teaching. They were the ones who, when other singers came in complaining about the vocal problems they were experiencing, would point at DeGennaro and declare, “Talk to him. He’s the one who never loses his voice.”

DeGennaro’s piano-barring included five years at Don’t Tell Mama, but he hasn’t been occupied in that capacity since 1995. The teaching, you know. But he has had and still has cabaret singers as satisfied clients. Karen Mason, both a boite and Broadway performer, says about his mentoring, “I always felt I walked away from my lessons with more ammo in my vocal arsenal.”

Though DeGennaro has been teaching for many years now — dividing his time about equally with performing — most of those years were devoted to one-on-one sessions. Only recently has he begun to appreciate the great value of workshops. He attributes the change of heart and direction to many students telling him, “I got more out of watching you working with other people.” At least one of them has said, “I would have chosen to believe only 30 percent of what you told me if I hadn’t seen how it works with others.” That explains DeGennaro’s fall schedule of four eight-week, seven-singers-each workshops, almost fully subscribed as of late August.

Declaring himself against tough-talking instructors — “I’m very aggressive, but [that's] not to be confused with being a mean teacher” — he doesn’t endorse the “You can never sing this, never sing that” school of admonishment. “I can’t live in a world of no,” he says. “Everything is fixable. I really do operate from a world full of yes.”