Singing in German

During the last week of December (and the first one of January), I further explored the voice preparation with the spaghetti exercise described in the Week 11 article. I tried looking for more ease and a sense of freedom in the voice production. I had a number of good experiences in that regard. In fact,…

This may sound like something extremely obvious, but many times we forget completely about it: we sing as we train, as we practice. That means that, in order to be able to achieve a specific result when we sing a song, we need to practice that a good deal consistently. We need to train our…

As I mentioned before in this series, many of the exercises with do in class with Patrick exert an indirect influence on certain parts of the vocal tract. One example I mentioned in the past was the act of yawning or sobbing. Both take the larynx down and are good resources to have an experience…

I heard about the importance of good breathing support (appoggio) since the first time I started learning how to sing, more than 10 years ago. But knowing something for a long time doesn’t guarantee that we actually use or act on that knowledge. That’s how I feel about appoggio. It’s not something new, but at…

This week I continued practicing the falsetto with and without last week’s song. During the lesson, my teacher shared a few clarifications on how to practice the falsetto. I learned that it was okay to go high, but not really high (beyond the high C). I discovered that it was such a thing as a…

One of the side benefits of taking singing lessons is that you start noticing new things in the music you listen to. That can happen even with songs you’ve already listened to dozens of times. Sometime during last week, it occurred to me as I was listening to All night, all day, by Lawrence Brownlee.…

Now that I have a repertoire of vocalization exercises, I thought it could be a good idea to put them all together and create sort of a daily routine. I asked Patrick about that, and he suggested an order based on the exercises that we’ve seen so far in our weekly lessons. Down below in…

One of the recent challenges I faced during this week of practice was connected with singing ‘A’ vowels in the high register. After talking about this with my voice teacher, he mentioned that is a common challenge for most students. Good to know that! 😄 But knowing others have the same problem shouldn’t be enough…

One of my favorite teaching devices is using analogies and similes to explain something. I appreciate that a lot also as a student. In the past weeks, my voice teacher has used this resource multiple times. For lowering the larynx, I’ve been told to think of yawning (even, starting a yawn). The second one was…

This week I had my fourth singing lesson. The practice goes well, even though I had a couple of days when I didn’t do any vocalization or singing. I continue keeping track of the days I practice as a way of trying to keep a longer streak. The goal is to make a long chain…

On October 18th I had my third singing lesson. At the beginning of the lesson, I usually share with Patrick the challenges I encountered during the last week of practice. Sometimes I focus exclusively on a new thing and forget the last one 😅. I know it’s difficult to think about everything we need to…

This week I had my second singing lesson. I feel quite comfortable learning and practicing in German. As I expected, one of the challenges is the technical vocabulary. In the first couple of lessons, I noticed that I didn’t know very important words for a singing student, such as Lunge(n) [lung(s)], Kehlkopf [larynx], Kiefer [jaw],…