Articulation for Singers
Song and aria lyrics should help to express, rather than impede, your best technique. This progressive series of lessons will teach you to release jaw and tongue tension, refine vowels, and produce consonants with ease and clarity. Learn to sing with consistent resonance and beautiful, intelligible diction.
Are Speech Habits Interfering with Your Resonance and Diction?
The answer for most of us is a resounding Yes.
The way we learn to articulate vowels and consonants in speech rarely leads to optimal resonance. We learn to speak by imitating the sounds we hear other people make, with the aim of making ourselves understood. While the way we naturally articulate some sounds will end up being closer to what we need for lyric diction than others, superb articulation for singing generally demands a wholesale reeducation of the jaw, tongue, lips, and soft palate.
This course provides the tools to accomplish just that. I created it because most of us do not receive this much-needed reeducation in voice lessons, at least not in a comprehensive fashion. There is always so much to cover – breathing, range, registration, musicianship, agility, stamina – that if we're singing with accurate diction, our teachers will turn their focus to matters that seem more closely related to vocal production. Yet even the most superb vocal production will only be fully realized when amplified by excellent resonance, and excellent resonance depends upon well-coordinated articulators.
Learn to Love All Your Vowels
Vowels are just internal resonating shapes, so if you love some vowels but dread others it is probably because you are articulating some with better coordination. Because vocal exercises are often limited to the five main Italian vowel sounds, you likely had little opportunity to practice singing many of the vowels that frequently occur in English, French and German. This course includes exercises for shaping and habituating all of the vowel sounds needed to perform in these languages.
Consonants Are Your Friends
If it seems as though consonants are only there to make your life difficult, I hope you'll give me the chance to show you how beautiful and expressive they can be! While some consonants may make you instinctively tighten your jaw or push extra breath, with practice you can learn to produce them with well-coordinated movements that facilitate rather than impede smooth, legato delivery of your texts.
Articulation Études
I have long felt that singers are as much in need of effective étude collections as instrumentalists. Good ones are in short supply, and part of the reason is that the kinds of things we need to repeat and habituate are not as easily notated as things like fingering for piano or violin. It's fairly easy to add fingering instructions to scales and arpeggios, but there is no elegant way to add notation to indicate things like lip or jaw movements to a printed score. I find it much more effective to provide visual demonstrations via video. I feel that this course is the singer equivalent of an instrumental étude resource, and because it is every bit as essential for us to learn articulation as it is for pianists to practice fingering, I've priced it accordingly.
Fifteen Video Lessons…
The course includes videos covering the anatomy of each major articulator – jaw, tongue, lips and soft palate – as well as exercises to release, strengthen and coordinate them. Additional lessons progressively introduce vowels and consonants, discuss which articulators are best for producing each, and offer exercises to train and habituate optimal positions and movements for every sound covered. It is my aim to present this material without prejudice for any particular approach to vocal technique, so it is designed to work well for students of all methods.
… Accompanied by PDF Downloads with Exercises and Resources
Each lesson includes a PDF download with illustrations, definitions, exercises and additional resources relating to the material covered.