"Pop Singing Will Ruin Your Voice": Let's look at that...
Meredith Colby Neuro-Vocal blog for voice teachers and vocal coaches about voice, singing, popular styles.
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Meredith Colby
- 1 min
Free Download, Tech Edition
The Online Student's Wish List Are you taking lessons online? Are you giving lessons online? Did you know that there are some simple solutions to common challenges, and some great tools to make the most of online lessons. For instance: Controls for camera height Microphones Sound Lighting This download explains the why, and gives you links to affordable, good quality solutions. You can even send this to your student as-is! Your Studio Microphone Setup This download is for the
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Meredith Colby
- 5 min
READING PEOPLE: Insights & Tools for Knowing What Your Students Are Thinking
For an independent voice pro, relationships are a big deal. They’re the foundation of what we do. If we aren’t confident and adept at managing the relationships with our clients - relationships that can sometimes last for years - then we aren’t teaching well. Relationships are literally enmeshed with the pedagogy we work so hard on. If the interpersonal thing ain’t happenin’, then the learning isn’t happening as well as it could. We need to have an awareness of our clients' t
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Meredith Colby
- 4 min
Voice Teacher vs. Vocal Coach: Which One Are You?
The choice of which moniker to use, Voice Teacher or Vocal Coach, is a personal choice. Most people think of themselves one way or the other - or in an entirely different way - and leave it at that. In academia there are voice teachers. In the world of popular singing, there are voice coaches. It shouldn’t matter what you call yourself, should it? Well…yes The term you use to describe your professional self represents a mindset that will affect the way that you approach both
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Meredith Colby
- 5 min
Time is Your Brain Container
Will you please copy this and put it somewhere you can see it? Like, tatoo it onto the back of your hand, for instance? You're not selling your time. You're selling your brain. Time is the container your brain comes in. Mind if I mess with your head? Most voice teachers and coaches say that we charge [whatever] an hour. When we think about raising our prices we tend to think of that increase based on a per-hour or per-lesson basis. But is that “face time” with a client rea
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Meredith Colby
- 5 min
What's Your Teaching Personality?
The S-I-N-G Personality tool helps you understand how to best help each & every student You’ve seen personality charts. From your daily horoscope and Cosmo quizzes to in-depth analyses like Meyers-Briggs and Clifton Strengths. We love to find out about ourselves, and personality charts are all about that! They become useful tools when the light they shed can help us, professionally or personally. As a voice teacher your personality and teaching style have attracted student
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Meredith Colby
- 6 min
STUDENT RETENTION: The Do's and Don't's To Keep Them Coming Back
Here is something I know about you: You’re nice. You care about your students’ progress, and you care about them as people. As professional as you’ve made your studio, it still stings a little when somebody quits lessons. It can fill you with self-doubt. Your nice-ness has really worked well for you. You’ve had wonderful relationships with your students, and even with your students’ families. But in some ways, your niceness is really getting in your way. Most voice teache
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Meredith Colby
- 4 min
3 Secrets About Pop Singers They'll Never Tell You In College
You may have worked as a band singer. If you have, you probably already know these three things. If you have never worked regularly as a band singer, read on. You need to know. Here's the broadcast. Or, CLICK HERE to view it on youtube Sometimes we voice experts are like Washington politicians: we think our world is the whole world. The truth is that the majority of paying gigs in any city - bar, restaurant, hotel, and private gigs - are not being played by people with col
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Meredith Colby
- 4 min
The Curse of the Smart & Talented: Procedural Learning in Singing
How to Help Your Students Learn Faster & Better It’s happened to you as a teacher. It may have happened to you as a voice student yourself. You’ve asked your client for a new or modified behavior or skill. You’ve made a recommendation for treating a phrase a certain way, for instance, or you’ve introduced a technique. Your student tries and assesses that they are "doing it wrong." The student may then do one or more of the following: · Give up (I can’t do this!) ·
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Meredith Colby
- 5 min
How to Develop Vocal Style
Find Your Artistic Voice In Microphone Styles When it comes to style, voice teachers generally fall into one of two categories. (I'm saying...generally.) We’re classically trained and don’t feel confident about working with the style element of microphone genres, or We’re microphone singers our own selves and haven’t really needed to think about style. We just do it. If you’re in either of those categories, you might not have a plan for addressing style in your students’ si
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Meredith Colby
- 6 min
Gigs for Singers
What's Available, and What To Know Often when singers think of gigging, they only consider bars and music theater stages. But if you’re interested in performing in public, there are many more choices than that! At the end of this post there’s an option to download a pdf of gig types and features. It lists 16 different types of gigs, with a description about each one. It also has a cross-reference chart about who will pay you, how they’ll treat you, and whether you’ll have a
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Meredith Colby
- 5 min
Registration in Popular Styles: Alternatives to Belting?
While stage singing, like opera or music theater, has prescribed norms for how it should sound, microphone singing does not.
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Meredith Colby
- 8 min
How To Give Yourself a Raise
Voice teachers are nice. Entirely too nice, really. By necessity, we have intimate relationships with our clients. We're also artists, and we nurture artists. We're unlicensed therapists, and are knit into our students' support networks. All this leads to a slippery slope. The slippery slope shows up for different people in different ways, but the challenges we often share fall under the category of putting others' perceived needs before our own. THAT issue shows up most
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Meredith Colby
- 4 min
Pop Repertoire for Teens & Tweens
Our teen singers are just like we were when we were teens. They’re in love with certain artists. They’re moved by artists whose music reflects their feelings back to them. They feel certain songs very deeply, and they want to sing those songs. We want to help them express themselves because we love them. But we also can feel a bit reticent sometimes. Read the blog or check out the broadcast! On one hand, teens seem like really easy clients. Typically they aren’t paying ou
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Meredith Colby
- 2 min
Why Your Work as a Voice Teacher Matters
Something happened in one of my students' lessons yesterday, and I can't stop thinking about it. My student is a Woman Of A Certain Age, and she's been singing all her life. She's has sung professionally and with amateur groups and bands. She's taking lessons with me, currently, because she wants to be able to sing in a pop style. Ideally with a high chest mix. She's also a strong and tenacious person, not given to emotionality or drama. Yesterday at her lesson she brought me
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- 3 min
How to Beat Back Depression
Statistically, it's likely that you're not very good at this "appreciation" thing. Most people aren't. Most people do
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- 6 min
NEAR ME: How to Show Up on Local Searches
Reprinted from the VASTA Voice, September, 2019 As an independent voice teacher, I don’t have the marketing budget of those big, national education businesses. In most ways I can't compete with them for my potential client's attention online. I do have an edge on the big guys, though, for a certain and very common type of online search. The “near me” search. You may have used this search term - sometimes at the suggestion of the search engine itself – when looking for a busin
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- 4 min
YOUR WEBSITE'S WELCOME MAT: How to Invite that Next Client In
A lot goes into marketing, and a freelancer's calling card is her website. What makes a client want to pick up the phone, shoot off an e
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- 5 min
What Am I? A Microphone Singer's Definition of Voice Types
New students sometimes ask me to label their voices. They want me to tell them if they’re an alto or soprano, for instance. Being someone who teaches microphone-based genres, I’m reluctant to do that, for reasons I’ll explain. But sometimes somebody wants a singer to write down “what [they] are,” so it’s good to have a safe answer. The terms alto, soprano, bass, and tenor are choral designations, and even in the setting of your choir or acapella group you may become a diff
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- 5 min
5 Versions of Vocal Onset in CCM
Ever heard that a certain way to start your sound is wrong, or will hurt your voice? It may be true if you're an opera singer, but if y
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