Vocal Teacher, Piano Teacher
Vocal Power and Piano Power Las Vegas
I just had the most distressing phone call… it was from someone who’s child is having distress over their voice. Now, I am going to be fairly vague as this is a very personal situation. But I just have to write about this and share it with you.
Having any kind of vocal distress is completely unnerving. If you have ever woken up and wondered how in the heck you are going to make it through your performance or speaking event or voice over, you know real despair. What an awful feeling that is! Of course, I’m not talking about when you are experiencing illness. What I’m talking about is real vocal affliction and pain and worse…not being able to make a connected sound.
One of the things that happened with this young person was the wrong teacher. People, I cannot stress this enough. YOU MUST BE EXCEEDINGLY CAREFUL WHEN CHOOSING A VOICE TEACHER OR VOCAL COACH. Yes, I’m (properly) yelling this at you. Listen! If you drop your musical instrument or if you overuse it or it breaks, you can go to the store and buy a new one. If you seriously injure or overuse or (cringe) use poor technique, there is no “voice store”. Your voice is a sacred part of your body! You must absolutely treat it with tender, loving care. You must absolutely warm up everyday. If you are a regularly working performer, you should be taking an entire day off, every week. You should understand how to breathe properly. Speaking properly is key. HYDRATION IS CRITICAL! OMG, sassy Karen is clearly in the house!
I’m so completely passionate about this because I know what it is like to be in vocal distress. It has happened to me and it is mortifying. I have a natural lightly raspy and deep voice. I have a slight deformity in one of my vocal cords and so I have a slightly breathy sound. Once I learned the proper way to warm up and truly care for my voice, my range and pitch and performance grew by leaps and bounds! I can teach for several days in a row and then perform on the weekends, without any worry about whether my voice will work or not. Now this isn’t easy! It requires effort and hard work…but this can happen for you as well!
There are many apps that I use to improve my musicality and to warm up my voice properly and easily. Yes, even though I play piano, I use apps when I’m not able to sit at the piano. Consistency is the key. Improvement doesn’t really happen at the lesson. Improvements happen in the practice in-between lessons. When you return to lesson, (which should be every week or every other week for professionals or aspiring professionals) the right teacher will support and guide and advise you on your progress. Check out this page where I talk about Ear Master. My current favorite warm up app is a no frills app called SF Singers Friend. You can choose your range, scale and speed. I love this thing! I simply turn it on and warm up right in my car or while I’m putting on make up! It’s fantastic!
Listen friends, we all have choices to make…how and what we spend our time and money when we are improving our artistry. Do your best to take the utmost care of your beloved instrument! I’m always here for you if you have any questions or if I can help you in any way! Here’s all the places you can find me!
You can find me at KarenMichaelsMusic.com for bookings. I’d love to play for your special event, cocktail party, cruise ship, restaurant or wherever you need beautiful music! If you need voice and/or piano lessons, head on over to my Facebook page for lessons and drop me a line there! In fact, let’s be online friends at Las Vegas Chicksinger in all these places! Read my reviews and testimonials, Like me on Facebook, I do live videos there at least once a week, and talk about my pursuit of love, happiness and music.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m currently working on the f# minor nocturne! they’re beautiful pieces.Don’t get me wrong, you have to be strong and confident to be successful in just about anything you do – but with music, there’s a deeper emotional component to your failures and successes. If you fail a chemistry test, it’s because you either didn’t study enough, or just aren’t that good at chemistry (the latter of which is totally understandable). But if you fail at music, it can say something about your character. It could be because you didn’t practice enough – but, more terrifyingly, it could be because you aren’t resilient enough. Mastering chemistry requires diligence and smarts, but mastering a piano piece requires diligence and smarts, plus creativity, plus the immense capacity to both overcome emotional hurdles, and, simultaneously, to use that emotional component to bring the music alive.
Before I started taking piano, I had always imagined the Conservatory students to have it so good – I mean, for their homework, they get to play guitar, or jam on their saxophone, or sing songs! What fun! Compared to sitting in lab for four hours studying the optical properties of minerals, or discussing Lucretian theories of democracy and politics, I would play piano any day.
But after almost three years of piano at Orpheus Academy, I understand just how naïve this is. Playing music for credit is not “easy” or “fun” or “magical” or “lucky.” Mostly, it’s really freakin’ hard. It requires you to pick apart your piece, play every little segment over and over, dissect it, tinker with it, cry over it, feel completely lame about it, then get over yourself and start practicing again. You have to be precise and diligent, creative and robotic. And then – after all of this – you have to re-discover the emotional beauty in the piece, and use it in your performance.