Lena- Singing Skills for Actors and Dancers (13th September 2012)

 Today was our first Singing lesson with Lena. We learnt what we would be doing in our singing lessons, what vocabulary we need to use and how to breathe and use certain muscles that will help improve our singing (Diaphragmatic Breathing).

 We learnt that we are doing Unit 30- Singing skills for actors and dancers. This unit will involve us develiping and improving our voices- how well we sing in TUNE and reach the high and low notes, how we understand what our tone is and how we need to improve it and also how to project our voices with control. We'll also need to develop our Musical Memory. After this we will go through the rehearsal process of which songs we are going to sing. We also need to learn to characterise these songs as this is Musical Theatre- singing, dancing AND acting. At the end of the course, we will have to do 3 songs- solo and ensemble.

 We learnt about how it's our muscles which enable us to sing. Our vocal chords are muscles and like other muscles, they have memory. For example, your arm muscles have learnt how to contract as you've trained them to do so. Once you've trained your vocal chords, they'll remember how to sing properly too. Diaphragmatic Breathing is another thing that we learnt during the lesson today. It enables us to control the strength and length of our notes. Diaphragmatic breathing works by breathing into your abdomen and relaxing your upper body (shoulders, neck ect.).

 

 We also learnt lots of vocabulary. Our throat has Larynx which is otherwise known as the voice box. The Larynx manipulates pitch and volume.

 We also did the 'Vee Ay Ah Oo' excercise. Lena was playing the piano and was going up in steps of semi tones which meant the pitch was getting higher and higher. I couldn't reach the last few notes but if I keep doing the diamaphragmatic breathing exercises Lena taught us in bed, I should be able to hit them eventually!