First lesson

“The definition of a good teacher is one who makes their students want to learn.” This is especially true for music teachers. I have no idea how Shannon got my head voice to start working. I somehow was having some weird problem getting it to work, and then all of a sudden, somehow, it was just working and I added almost a 10th to my range. It was huge, it was ridiculous, it was awesome. I don’t think she intended to save the fireworks (making me blow myself away with my own falsetto) for the end, but the last 10ish minutes where I sang higher than I thought I would ever be able to, was pretty amazing.

The whole lesson was pretty amazing actually. I had gotten a voice lesson from Shannon about two years ago; most of the information had been forgotten, but some had been assimilated. For example, I remembered not to wrinkle your face, but I couldn’t remember why. Anyway, we basically recovered all that material, talked about what’s happening in your body with different things and then talked about falsetto. I also recorded the lesson, which means I’ll always have all the info.

Some points to note from the lesson:

- Falsetto and head voice are NOT the same thing. For now I’m using the term interchangeably (as most people do). This is going to be my first research topic: finding out the difference, finding out what I’m doing now, and hopefully becoming able to do the other as well.

- I had some friends who were classical vocalists, and they always said about how alcohol could ruin your voice. I know it can really lower your voice (I totally went home and nailed an Eb that was over an octave below the bass clef on Thursday night). Anyway, the big thing that alcohol does to hurt your voice is dehydrating you. Your vocal folds are in your trachea and pouring water down your esophagus does not hydrate them. You must keep your body hydrated. Ergo, the dehydrating effects of alcohol are the big problem with alcohol (there are other minor ones, but they don’t really apply to me, and definitely won’t apply to my students…). The same goes for anything that dehydrates you. Tons of sugar (which is a problem for me since I drink a lot of iced tea), is just as bad.

- A lot of talk about how the vocal folds work and how to not damage them. A big point was that ROD STEWART is what someone who has damaged their vocal folds sounds like (take that, mom). What a node is, what it does to your folds, etc…

Anyway, it was a great lesson. For now I’ve got lots of stuff to work on. My first priority is really getting all over the falsetto. Bringing the falsetto lower and mixing both head and chest voices to make gradual changes and put in different inflections.
Anyway, thanks for reading
Trevor