The main Practice & Play page has some useful information about practice frameworks. It’s also fine to dive right in. Welcome!
It’s important to remember that rote vocal exercises don’t do anything on their own. For vocal growth, we’re more interested in nervous system learning and coordination than tissue manipulation. Make sure you are mindfully engaged with this process! Your focus might be to:
- Run an Experiment
- Play a Game
- Seek Pleasure
- Make it Your Own
There are three guidelines:
- Stay Curious
- Stay Attentive
- Stay Playful
…and one tip:
- Allow for the possibility of maximum ease and pleasure in your exploration. Find what feels nice.
Speak some text, try a little conversational speech, hum a bit of a song…in short, use your voice and notice how things feel. That way, you’ll be able to notice anything interesting that happens during your play time and compare it to the “before.”
You can come back to your reference as often as you like. (Thanks to Robert Sussuma for the concept of the “reference performance”).
Here are some ideas for developing a reference text if you don’t already have something in mind.
- Decide how much time you’ll spend, then explore your unique pathway through the work.
- Feel free to skip around.
- Don’t try to do everything.
- Find what feels good today and follow your curiosity.
(Or, if you like a little more structure, you can follow along with one of these audio sequences):