Lesson #2

This was my second lesson with Miss Dani Miller and I really wanted to focus on feeling the resonating feeling.  To start off I quizzed her on the proper posture and what type of voice she needed to focus on singing in.  She also said she tried to practice the warm up scales I gave her everyday at least once.  This was encouraging knowing that she is putting effort into the lessons.  We didn't get past doing basic warm-ups this lesson to really test her range.  I could diffidently hear her passaggio in the E5 which indicates she is more a mezzo soprano.  This doesn't surprise me because her body type gives off a mezzo soprano look with a medium height and longer neck.
I tried different types of warm-ups to try to get her to feel the resonance and what should be happening when she is singing correctly.  The one that seemed to help the most was having part of her hand in the front part of her mouth.  By doing this it kept the space in her mouth open and put the resonance up in her sinus area.  I found it really hard to explain the head voice to her and get her to understand.  She is a very heavy chest voice singer.  I tried using the " talk like Mrs. Doubtfire" and " a opera singer" explanations but they just seemed to confuse her.  It was frustrating I finally did get a little through when I explained it as a "Steve Erkel bunny" meaning the high geeky voice all smushed in like a bunny nose.
When we did sirens I was surprised that she just couldn't seem to do it.  She would hit a high pitch that was forced and then skip down to low notes.  I'm not quiet sure how to fix this but I will diffidently work on it.  As a practice I did have her do "twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on an E.  This did seem to help but I kept noticing her switching to just a regular E and not a high resonate E.
I plan to start a piece in her next lesson but for now just getting to have her feel a head voice is challenging.