home > speech level singing > May 10, 2010 - johno's 10th -> 17th lessons with Emil Svensson
It's been a long time since my last update. The main reason for this is that I found myself painting myself into a corner somewhat. You see, I had this really strong need to theorize a lot about what was going on with my SLS progress, but at around the time of my 10th less I realized that I didn't really have a clue what was going on. As a result I really didn't feel like I could write anything cohesive that would be of any use to anyone, so I laid off it for a while and just focused on taking lessons.
From there until now I had a pretty long period of just going on pure faith. I tried to practice on my own as much as I could, but it was hard because I was afraid of failure. I associated practice to just being crappy at singing. It was all just very hard and painful on a psychological level.
Within the space of just the last 2 or 3 lessons, literally in the space of a few weeks, I have found that I all of a sudden can maintain vocal cord contact throughout the entire scales, way beyond the highest notes I could hit before I started with this. This has really been something of a significant hurdle, as the consistent sensation of raspy and poorly connected vocal cords made me feel like I would never be able to use my head voice for anything at all.
I still have some distance to go before I can sing with this new technique, and listening to the lessons I can still hear lots of things that I'm doing wrong (high larynx is a bad habit for me, always has been...) The main reason, however, I am writing this entry is that I am seriously starting to FEEL something new going on. I know what cord connection feels like in head voice, my voice doesn't break apart all the time anymore, etc.
What I need to do now is to start trusting my voice to be able to sing these notes consistently. It's really all a psychological thing at this point.
A parting note: As Emil is only in Goteborg once every second week these days, I've started taking lessons over Skype in addition to the ones here in Goteborg in the interest of more regular lessons. I must say that it works really well, granted that you have a decent webcamera and a decent microphone / speaker setup. I use a laptop that has all this stuff built in, so I don't have to use a headset or anything like that.