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Jersey Jack

TMV World Legacy Member
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Everything posted by Jersey Jack

  1. There's been a problem with email at SS for some time. After not receiving any response to several emails I finally called them. To my surprise, they were extremely responsive and helpful on the phone--the problem was resolved swiftly and successfully. It is surely odd, however, that a business so dependent upon the web so consistently drops the ball on email. Do try to call them, as I'm sure you'll find the response a lot better.
  2. Yes, that's no doubt true, but I'm not sure that it would matter, as the point seems to be that talent is not as magical (to use the word in the video) as it is usually taken to be. Would-be singers are particularly vulnerable to this kind of criticism. Nobody ever thought (I imagine) that somebody like Tom Brady would be where he is without training, coaching, practice, experience, etc., but we hang on to the myth that singers are different. This doesn't mean that anyone can become Tom Brady, only that it's a big mistake to cut short a goal because someone says "kid, you just don't have it." By the way, the argument in the video is lifted from Malcolm Gladwell's great book Outliers. Gladwell calculates that every great achiever (he specifically writes of The Beatles, Bill Gates, Mozart, and Michael Jordan) puts in a minimum of 10,000 hours before they achieve greatness. The greatness of the Beatles, he argues, was forged by the experience of playing 7-8 hours a day for months at a time in Hamburg. I find the argument compelling. I highly recommend Gladwell's book for anyone interested in this topic.
  3. So is the idea then that the sound is supposed to shoot stright up into the soft palate instead of projecting out of the mouth? That sounds like a recipe for nasality and a weak voice! Clearly, I'm missing something....
  4. I'm intrigued by this business of top-down phonation, but I don't quite see how to put Robert's description into practice. The description offered above goes like this: 1. singing through the resonators. 2. Calibrating ringy overtones through the mask. Don't we always sing through our resonators? Are there specific resonators that should receive special emphasis? And I'm not sure how to go about "calibrating ringy overtones through the mask." What might we be calibrating them to or against? Are we always trying to raise them or lower them, or does it depend on the singer and the situation? Also, is top down phonating something we should always do, or only in certain circumstances? I realize that this discussion builds on previous discussions and that you guys have developed a vocabulary over time that allows for this kind of shorthand. I really would like to get a better handle on this, however, as it sounds like something that might really improve my singing. Specifically, my vowels tend to be squishy rather than firm and sharp--largely, it seems to me, because my overtones are not stable.
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