Pumpkin Spice Lattes = Time to Drink Water

Ah, the irony of this picture.

So when I was in college I was told I have a hole in my heart.  (How's that for an introductory sentence?)  It's nothing serious, apparently.  In fact, the doctor who told me basically made it sound like I just had something as benign as the common cold.  And he said it can be caused by dehydration.  That made sense to me since I hadn't had a glass of water since 1992.

Today's post is about dehydration... and the catalyst for this post was the fact that yesterday I heard that dreaded sound that we all know and love; the heat in my building was turned on. Fall is in the air my friends! Starbucks might be serving your seasonal fave but it's time to buy a Poland Spring.

If you've never lived in NYC you may not know what it's like to live in an apartment where you cannot control the thermostat.  It's pretty wretched.

Here is a snapshot of what our lives are like:
October 1st through May 31st is "Heat Season" in New York City. Building owners are also required to provide tenants with heat as follows: 

• Between the hours of 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM, if the outside temperature falls below 55 degrees, the inside temperature is required to be at least 68 degrees Fahrenheit; and, 
• Between the hours of 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, if the temperature outside falls below 40 degrees, the inside temperature is required to be at least 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

Let me assure you, the temperature is DEFINITELY higher than 55F. Many of us (myself especially) live with open windows all winter.  And the higher you live, the hotter it is.  Since heat rises, you can expect that if you live on the 6th floor like I do, you will boil.  To death.  All winter.  Cozy, you might say?  No.  From the very moment I hear that steam sound coming from the heater I

Curses! 7 more months of this crap! 

start to curse the day I was born and everybody I know, and I count the days until Spring on a calendar on which I cross out each little day with my own blood.  Dramatic? Ok maybe.  I've been watching Once Upon a Time a lot.  But anyway, it's rough!  And not good for our voices!  It's dry as hell!



I did an unintentional experiment this summer with a basil plant I bought from Trader Joes.  Truth be told, I don't have a green thumb.  But take a look at this:

It took 1 DAY for this to happen. It's the same plant.  Water is a powerful (magical) thing.
Just briefly to be nerdy for a second, your vocal cords are not vital organs which means that they're not the first to get water.  If my HEART wasn't even getting water, you can imagine how crusty and dry my vocal cords were. 

I have a friend who insists on drinking 5 Liters of water a DAY. I followed her lead and the first day  it took me a full day to finish one bottle. Now that I'm used to it I can drink 1 liter in under 5 minutes and want more.  I never knew what THIRSTY felt like.  All these years I thought I was HUNGRY or just had a MIGRAINE.  Meanwhile I was probably severely dehydrated.

During the wintertime it's really important for us to hydrate especially while the heat is on.  Even if we do have the luxury of thermostat control...

Instead of thinking you're going to melt like a Wicked Witch when you come in contact with H20,

• take it in small doses at first.  You don't need to be a hero.  
• when life gives you lemons... use them. it makes drinking water easier because it tastes better. 
• weirdly enough, some bottled water comes from regions where there is higher salt content.  It might be that you don't like SOME water.  Try other brands of bottled water.  I like Smart Water and can't drink one called Volvic because it makes me feel like I swallowed the Atlantic Ocean.  Maybe I was a water sommelier in a past life.

Hm!

How much water do you drink? Do you notice a difference vocally when you're not drinking water?

Animation Voiceover Trickery - Singing and Speaking Voices Provided by Two Separate Artists

Take a listen to Journey to the Past from Anastasia.... and watch the scene leading up to the song, too.    


Notice anything?!  The speaking voice is provided by Meg Ryan... but the singing voice is provided by Broadway vet Liz Callaway. It's so cool how they blend together, isn't it?!  Kind of makes you wonder if that's how Meg Ryan would sing or if she'd sound totally different.  What do you think makes this particular match successful?

The singing voice double has been done for many animated movies, not just Anastasia.  For instance, the voices for Jasmine (Aladdin) and Pocahontas are also provided by Broadway actresses.  Jasmine's singing voice is Lea Salonga and Pocahontas is Judy Kuhn.

Also, Anastasia is available on Netflix!  If you've never seen it, watch it! Bernadette Peters voices a character, too!

Some 1960's Mixing Perfection? I think so!

I think Julie Andrews is a great gateway mixer for those who are working on it!  Listen to the brightness in her legit in the beginning and then the "shouty-ness" in the last 32 bars (2:40).  SO awesome.  And I think even Brit JULIE ANDREWS is capable of the occasional nasalized /i:/.  MY HERO.  Someone we should all be studying.


Julie Andrews -"I Have Confidence In Me"- THE SOUND OF MUSIC - (Subtitulada en español) from Helena Moreno on Vimeo.

How You Could Be Tossing Thousands of Your Hard Earned Dollars into the Vocal Abyss

I've been thinking about this a lot and I think it warrants a post.   Let it be known.  I love a good bargain.  If you know me, there is nothing that excites me more than getting something awesome on sale.  I like to think I inherited this trait from my Irish-Potato-Famine-Escaping-Great-Depression-Enduring ancestors. We'll come back to this later but keep this in mind.

Let it also be known:   I am a Voice Memo addict.  I record everything and everything on my phone.    So I ask all the non-addicts out there this question: 

To record or not to record?! My answer is... record EVERYTHING.  Just record it all.  These are some of the reasons why you are currently not recording your lessons:

• You hate the way you sound on your recordings
• You don't have enough memory or battery life on your phone to record
• You won't listen to it anyway
• You forgot

Reasons Why You Should Record:

• First and foremost, you're wasting your hard earned moula if you're not recording.  Think of it as a Buy 1 Get Infinity Free deal.  You can take this voice lesson an infinite amount of times! I still listen to voice lessons I took in 2008.  They're still and always will be valuable and....
• This is how I track my progress!
• We would be taking notes if we were in any other kind of class.  This is our version of taking notes.  
• Do you know about Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences?  To boil it down very simply, people absorb information differently depending on the way it is presented to them. For example, some people are visual learners; some people are kinesthetic learners; some people are auditory learners, etc.  Remember when you were in school and if the teacher said something you wouldn't remember it but if she wrote it on the board you'd remember? That might mean you were a visual learner. Anyway, the act of taking the voice lesson and singing in that moment is a kinesthetic thing.  You're physically singing and producing that sound. But if you're not a kinesthetic learner and you're an auditory learner like myself,  HEARING the lesson and listening to yourself is a whole other opportunity to absorb that information.  Now your brain has two options to absorb the information:  Do and Listen.  
• Some of us learn better by watching other students work and receive feedback.  This is an opportunity to "watch you work."  Listen objectively as if you were listening to another student.  Think about what you did, what you liked, what you'd do instead, etc., and how you can fix it for next time. 
• Thinking about the lesson is still practice. When I was in college I was living with between 1-3  

  

  My own mother thought this was a picture of me.
  Ma, come on. This is not me. 

  roommates at any given time and it was difficult to find a time to practice when nobody else was home.  I recorded my lessons from beginning to end, listened to all 45m every day on my subway rides and came in to my lessons knowing exactly what I was supposed to do without having uttered a note all week.  I was "practicing" even though I hadn't been singing.  And I was making progress!  
• You may hate the way you sound on the recording but just know that these shitty internal microphones and speakers that we're using every day on our phones are not doing us justice. It's a good way to train ourselves to stop wincing at the sound of our own voices and get over it.  If it bothers you a lot, try recording on two separate devices. Sometimes I bring my computer, too, just to cross reference.  Also, try listening back with earbuds instead of playing it out loud on speakerphone.  That usually helps a LOT and can give you a more accurate representation of how you actually sounded. 
• Bring a charger, sucka!  Just add it to your list of things to bring! Book? Check!  Water? Check! Phone and charger? Check! 
• Listen on the subway.  Great way to multitask. 
• Forgetting to record does suck... but try to make it a habit to record from the second you get there - not at the start of the warmup...even if it means recording the first 5m of the lesson when you're talking about how the subways suck and you're preparing for an agent meeting.  It's so worth it because you won't realize 35m in that you forgot to press record.  

Reasons Why You Should Record the WHOLE Lesson:

• Lots of people do record but they just record the singing parts.  That's great if we're just recording something that's consistently in our vocal bones, but in my mind if we're working on something that we're visiting for technical reasons, the most valuable part of the lesson is the talking leading up to the singing.  What exactly did we say that got you to make that sound?  Because next week when we're not able to find that sound again again and neither of us can remember what we did to get there, we're going to wish we had the recording.  That alone will help you save a ton of money because you'll never have to work on the same thing twice.  
• You may think you understand an instruction from your coach in the moment, but later when you're not distracted by the millions of things going on during the lesson and you listen again, you might have an "Ohhhhh THAT'S what he meant!" moment.  It's like when you're watching your favorite movie for the kazillionth time and you find something you never noticed before.  It's awesome!!! 
• Yes, it might take a lot of room on your phone but you've gotta suck it up and delete some selfies and videos of your drunk friend falling down the stairs to make the room so you can save MONEY.  Say you're spending anywhere from $60-$300 on a voice lesson in NYC... and you only get 45m with that teacher.  Wouldn't you want to prolong that lesson if you could?  Spend "450 minutes" with that teacher and listen to the lesson 10 times this week!  If you weren't reviewing and listening to the lesson on your own time, chances are he'd have to say the same things at your next lesson anyway so you might as well get it for free!  I'm not kidding when I say it KILLS me when we get something sounding awesome in a lesson and then I ask if that was recorded and the answer is no.  

So this, my friends, is why I think everybody should record everything. 

I even have a hard drive dedicated specifically to my voice memos of my old lessons. That's thousands and thousands of dollars worth of vocal instruction that I've got at my fingertips.  Even my college tuition is TANGIBLE because I recorded my entire education!!!  
I even record some of my students' stuff (with permission, of course) because in the same way that I feel you should do this as a student, I do this as a teacher. It's good to go back and self-evaluate and say, "OK How could I have made that more succinct?" "How did we do that?" "What worked/What didn't work?"or even "Wow that was freakin AWESOME !!!"... And now it's not MY lessons anymore that I'm listening to on the subway; it's my students'! 

I have 213 Voice Memos on my phone and over 300 on my computer.  How many do you have????