About
I'm Meredith Colby.
Innovator, Musician, Author, Obsessive Learner, & Creative Dissenter
I've used my smarts, along with curiosity and my life journey to create something new. It's something that solves problems - problems of university-trained voice teachers, self-trained vocal coaches, and the singers who employ those folks.
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​My magical unicorn power is the ability to take a dense and complex topic and make it accessible and applicable. I've done that with neuroscience + voice training.
It's called NeuroVocal Method.
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My Story
Four years of classical lessons in high school. Not because I loved classical music. I’d never heard a classical singer. I loved R&B, punk, and singer/songwriters. ​
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Then a year abroad tending bar and singing in pubs. Then five more years of classical voice lessons at university.
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I thought I was doing the right thing. I followed instructions, met expectations, checked the boxes. I didn't realize, of course, that I was cementing a motor memory for a kind of singing I didn't want and couldn't use.
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When I left the University of Miami I couldn't sing the kind of music that had been my dream to perform. I sounded wrong. But I was able to join a road band, where I sang five or six nights a week for nine months. And trashed my voice.
After a year of therapy and healing, I moved to Chicago. A friend introduced me to a vocal coach who was a studio singer and concert performer. He lived in the same world that I did, and taught me how to sing for that world.
It was the first time in my life I felt like I was actually singing.
I wanted to help other singers (also quit my day job) so I took graduate-level how-to-teach-voice at Northern Illinois University and set out to save all the microphone singers!
For the next 20 years I was a freelance singer in Chicago. I coached band singers and music theater singers during the week and sang with bands on the weekends. I headlined at most of the jazz clubs in that jazz town, sang on cruise ships, and with society bands. I headed up The Center For Voice in Chicago, directed choirs, and was a church music director. I recorded a CD of original jazz tunes. I did a lot of different gigs for music, money, and both.
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I was also becoming a neuroscience nerd; reading and learning more and more about the exciting and rapidly changing field of neuroscience.
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When I retired from regular gigging and focused on coaching (and on being a mom), I dug deeper into learning the connections between neuroscience and singing. I'd learn a thing, suppose how it might work with a singer's brain, and try it out on my clients.
I had been unwittingly using these same principles for years in my coaching. I was determined to support my singing clients in the music they loved. Neuroscience seemed like the best way to get there. I was connecting some dots and getting excited about it.
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What I didn't know at the time is that I was evolving a way to approach singing based on neural didactics. That's the name for the application of neuroscience to education. I added the third intersection of singing, and the results were astounding.
If you want to know about how NVM came about, you can read the story on the About NVM page. I wrote Money Notes: How to Sing High, Loud, Healthy, and Forever in 2016. It’s about NeuroVocal Method, and about microphone singing.
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I’ve been there. The world of college and classical, the pain of vocal damage and recovery, and the journey of re-training a voice. I've paid my rent with my singing and logged my 10,000 hours.
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I also love being a science nerd, working wth brains, sharing what I learn through presentations and content creation, and coaching singers. It's a great job.
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BULLET POINT BIO
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Author of Money Notes: How to Sing High, Loud, Healthy, and Forever
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Creator of NeuroVocal Method for popular styles; an approach to singing based on brain science.
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30+ years teaching experience.
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25+ years performing experience
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Specializes in CCM/Popular, Pop/Rock, contemporary styles, microphone-based genres, call-it-what-you-will
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Bachelor of Music in Studio Music & Jazz - Vocal from University of Miami (Coral Gables)
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Post-grad vocal pedagogy at Northeastern Illinois University
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Certified by the Neuroscience Academy, Melbourne, AU
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Experience as ED of Music Ed. non-profit, music director, choir director, ECE arts program director
WHAT PEOPLE SAY
The Teacher
The Method
A Few of Meredith's Clients
Tim McIlrath of Rise Against
Jason Jones of Drowning Pool
Ross Bon of The Mighty Blue Kings
Stan Borys, international recording artist, the Tom Jones of Poland
Ed (King) Roser of Urge Overkill
Justin Roberts, award-winning children’s music artist
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Oscar Wilson of Cash Box Kings
Mark Harrington of Relative Ash
Todd Joseph of Buzzcord
Joey Duenas of Un Loco
Chris Wallace of White Tie Affair
Stella Katsoudos of Sister Soleil and Stella
Anouk, solo Danish artist
Frankie Burke of Slytherin
Heidi Phillips of Frogpond
Tom Cloud, Chicago recording artist
Cathy Glickman, children’s music artist Miss Cathy
Sony Records
Columbia Records
Island Def-Jam Records
Windup Records
Innerscope Records
Dreamworks
Grammy Award-winning producer Johnny K.
Dr. Paul Jones, ENT
Lori Sonnenburg, Clinical Speech Therapist at Bastion Voice Institute
Nathan Waller, Northwestern University Center for Audiology, Speech, Language, and Learning
