In the last article we talked about how to start creating a song list to help build your voice. This week – assuming you’ve got your list finalised and to hand – I want to give some further advice on how to shape and continually work with ordering your song list to improve your voice.
Firstly, consider how we use voice exercises
1) When we work on someone’s voice, we start with a warmup.
2) We then proceed to lower impact exercises designed to co-ordinate and connect the voice.
3) We then proceed to higher impact calibration and voice building exercises.
4) We may then proceed to a few voice checks that are designed to check where the voice has ended up after all that warmup/co-ordination/development work.
This is a broad overview, but each stage naturally picks up where the last one left off. Each stage also prepares the voice for the next upcoming stage. We therefore want to segue into songs, and ensure that the songs also pick up where the voice exercises left off, and transition neatly into one another.
Ordering your list
Once you start singing through your list regularly, you’ll start to notice that some seem to get your voice firing just right (after the exercise portion of working on your voice), and others seem to help less in that regard. This is when you can start to experiment with the order of your set list.
Try to put the songs that get your voice working the best first in the list. Let them do the heavy lifting to get your voice doing it’s thing. These might not even be the easiest songs or the hardest songs in your list. It’s more about a continuation of the development and performance arc you started along from warmup to co-ordination to development during the exercises.
Harder ones first…
For example, I used to start my song/etude list with one song (‘Song for you’ – Donny Hathaway), and then I switched to another song that was later in the list (‘Feel the fire’ – Peabo Bryson). My voice starting working even better than it did before, and got there MUCH sooner because it was the first song in the list. And again, recently I switched the first song to yet another song that was previously later in the list which was much much harder, and once more, things moved forward. All the other songs later in the list benefitted from this better song choice earlier in my practice.
Easier ones first…
In contrast, one of my students has been following this process relatively recently, and started their song list religiously with one particular song. They recently re-ordered their list to put another one first – one which was easier on a technical level – and it made a colossal difference to how quickly they managed to get their voice working properly in song. Everything just seemed to fire up and co-ordinate better in song. It also meant that when they went to the original #1 song, it too sounded and felt much better.
There’s no right or wrong, just what works for you
It’s all about spending some time with one order, then identifying what works/what doesn’t work, and re-ordering in response to that data. It’s a glacial process, but it makes a HUGE difference to integrating your voice into songs, and learning how to use the songs as exercises to build your voice… rather than just exercises, or just adding exercises into the songs.
Give it a try with ordering your song list. Start running through it and see which songs seem to work better in your voice. See what results or improvements can be gleaned by being strategic not just with your song choice, but your song order post-vocalises.