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

A fellow voice teacher and I were talking about a quandary that all teachers of the arts face: whether or not to encourage students to pursue their art. It’s a tough one. A few weeks ago, I posted a blog about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, an effect whereby we are very confident that we’re very good at things we know little about. The arts depend on the Dunning-Kruger Effect. If newbie artists really knew: how really hard it is to be successful in the arts how little they really