Thoughts from Vocal Process
Here's a training video and transcript on skill acquisition I recorded for our Singing Teacher Accreditation Programme Cohort21. It's an explanation, deep dive and commentary on the article Principles of Skill Acquisition Applied to Vocal Training by Katherine Verdolini (pdf at the end). So I'm starting with a precis of everything that she was saying, and [...]
What’s the difference between a hobby, a job, a career and a vocation? And is it important for me to know? Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love, wrote a post called "What are you doing with your life?" defining hobby, job, career and vocation, and shows how separating them out consciously helps [...]
Do you look after yourself? After writing the article “I have a superpower, what's yours?” I read more about Dr Emma Kavanagh and I came across this article written for the Guardian in October 2021. I read one line that summed up a particular worry: “the kettle does not go in the fridge, good grief.” You find yourself doing something [...]
An article arrived in my inbox from psychologist and author Emma Kavanagh and I discovered I have a superpower. I’ve always known something about it but it’s never been described as a superpower before. First of all, when we have nothing pressing to do “the midline of our brain lights up with activity. This is the area [...]
This is a Voice - Golden Nuggets February 7th Each week we'll be tweeting about our #ResourceOfTheWeek (you'll see the tweets below), but on this blog we'll be sharing more "behind the scenes" details with you. We're mixing it up again this week with examples and excerpts from five different sources. So the Theme of the [...]
We've only gone and done it. We've tackled the big one. Vocal registers. Have you any idea how much grief there is on the internet about registers and what they are/mean/sound like? From the 1840s when Garcia put forward his ideas about vocal registers to the "free and frank exchange" at the CoMeT conferences in the [...]
I read another thought-provoking blog from Zapier this morning (https://zapier.com/blog/a-company-is-not-a-family/), and it got me thinking. Singing teachers and singers are social beings, and social beings like being part of a "family" - for some it even defines who they are. So we have facebookgroupies, twitterfiends, instamates and a whole host of “family” replacement titles. What's the [...]
Vocal technique and pedagogy have changed, even during my adult lifetime. We’ve gone from the Master/Apprentice model (“do it like me, dear”) and the personal sensation model (“feel the voice like a pink cloud, aim the sound down the elephant’s trunk, and sing from your little mary”) through to the pure physiological (“move your nasosternal muscle [...]
In the final episode of Series 2 of our This Is A Voice Podcast, we're riffing about life after Lockdown, the Vocal Process Teacher Accreditation Programme, and how many different ways there are of working with us (it's all in the Ziggurat). We're chatting about How life has changed since our first podcast episode a year [...]
Imposter Syndrome is real. The fundamental issue with Impostor Syndrome is not being able to internalize your own success. If you have it, you might believe that where you are/what you are doing is all down to luck and nothing to do with you and your abilities. It was first identified by Pauline Rose Clance and [...]
