Preparing for Lessons

1. You. Try to be present in the lesson if possible, sometimes we do just get distracted and that's completely chill but it will make our time less effective if your primary focus is elsewhere.

2. A microphone suitable for online communication. And a setup/environment that makes learning easier. It's not the end of the world if you havent got a super snazzy setup but certain things make lessons more productive. First up, make sure to check out the slideshow in the grey section above, it should lead you through joining the discord itself and configuring the in discord microphone settings. The purpose is to get computer processing out of the way so I can accurately hear your voice as if your voice is cutting out then it can make certain aspects of feedback impossible to give. 

There are a few more things worth attention. Try to have a way to listen to yourself during lessons. The true ideal is an audio interface that allows for lag free playback from your microphone to your ears, that is a niche items, so it's enough to have some headphones on and to keep one ear popped off for the duration of the lesson. The next best thing would be to wear earphones and pop one side off so you can hear your own voice bounced back from the room. Please do wear earphones during lessons as that makes effective communication easier and headphones tend to be better sound quality wise than speakers. 

3. A glass/bottle etc of water, staying hydrated during a lesson is a good thing to do and may make voice work easier, even if to some extent it can function more as placebo. 

4. I hesitate to say these ones because they may not always be useful, but you may want things like a brown noise generator on your phone, this isn't a super super common need but if need for one does come up it helps to save time if you have one installed, so its a good thing to have just in case. And you may also want a real time pitch monitor app on your phone e.g. nail the pitch (which can be found on both apple and android).   Remember that while we can use apps to facilitate training they can't effectively be used as a replacement for training our ears or do the work for us, so whenever using an app try to think about relating it back to improving our other skills.

5. This is another situational one but it can be useful for quite a few people. If you can do a lip trill (if you look at youtube you should be able to find a video or two explaining what they are) then you can ignore this, if not... A semi filled glass of water (think 3-4 cm) and a small-ish diameter straw (bonus points if you get straws of various sizes, but smaller the better generally). We may use these for Semi-occluded-vocal-tract exercises in selectively applicable situations. SOVTEs can also generally be good for helping to support good vocal health so having the tools do carry a variety of them out can be beneficial anyway.

Practice is a pretty nebulous topic and getting all caught up in "should I learn this before I start practising", "should i try to practice for x amount of time" and similar thoughts are pretty common so I want to provide you with the very first and most important thing when it comes to practice, actually using our voices is the most important and most valuable step. Practice is a pretty important way of normalising progress and making sure it doesn't slip. But more than this, practice is the best time to apply the things we learn in lessons, we can of course spend time practising in lessons, but a large part of making progress is by exploring in your own time and making progress like that. This being said, when we approach practice there are some pretty important things to note, we don't want practice to be an arduous endeavour. Taking 30 seconds here and there can be (and often is) more valuable than spending 30 minutes grinding a behaviour. We should try to make practice fun and inherently make our practice failure proof by focusing on improving control and by leaning into learning strategies that reinforce control like, spaced repetition. We don't really want to schedule practice, we want it to be more spontaneous and fun. This being said if you take lessons with me it could be good to take notes of what you've practised on a day, maybe even a 10 word note to yourself on anything you played with for 20 seconds, so u can keep it in your mind and so we can talk about how practice was for you during the week. Probably aiming for at least a 30 second practice window on any given day.

And one last thing, thinking about our goals in practice, and how to relate them back to what we are aiming to do. In this scenario below the idea is that we want to contextualise resonance practice as much as possible within speech as it can tend to go awry otherwise.

An example of this would be.

Okay I'm doing big dig small dog exercise, first thinking why am I doing this? Okay so I'm working on resonance.

 How can I further relate this back to speech? Okay so I could try whispering words? Yeah let's do that. (or u could use a vowel)

Okay how else can I make this more speech like, oh I could add voice?

If I can add voice, can I try speech?

Okay I've added speech but it wants to drop in resonance. 

If I want to relate it back to speech maybe I can try practising resonance modification in speech

That said... If you can skip straight to playing with it voiced. i.e. minimising the mental processing steps you take when you try something out, that's even better. Because we're trying to train up our control and intuitive understanding. 

On a related note, I want to highlight that we aren't always going for absolute maximums in things like pitch resonance and weight, we may want to be able to get to those things, but most voices are not based in those spaces. And often times if you do try to leave these things locked to their maximums the voice can sound atypical to listeners.

So, there's not a ton to say here, beyond having vocal goals can be helpful. There's no need to have a distinct voice you want to get to, but having a rough ballpark can be useful for us to contextualise the way we approach certain things. Having a few examples of the general vibe we are looking for could be pretty good if its going into our first session, as we can have a talk about goals and expectations this way, as well as highlight that. This is not to say that you need to have concrete vocal goals. Having shifting vocal goals is also entirely valid, I myself do not have a ton of super focused vocal goals. If you aren't sure about the a specific voice or voice type maybe start thinking about what sorts of voices catch your interest.

In a similar ish(but different) vein to vocal goals is mimicry. Mimicry is a great tool to incorporate into our practice, and is a great way for us to explore lots of stuff in a low stress way. Mimicry is best paired with a Laissez-faire approach, we aren't going for perfect impersonations, we are just going for a rough estimation and maybe a little bit of reflection as we go, our main emphasis here is on fun and trying new things.

I would encourage you to put together two voice playlists before the first session. 

1. Voices that you just think sound cool (don't get too hung up over accent, gender presentation, feasibility or anything else like that). The main goal with this one is to help us understand what voices sound like and later on for exploring new vocal mixtures as this is often one of the best ways to escape progress plateaus.

2. If you have a general goal then this is where you'd want to try to find examples that match it. If passing is the explicit goal then I'd recommend selecting voices that you have some common ground with in terms of expectations. e.g. voices that share the same accent as you, same age, similar social class etc. Though if you're moving to somewhere with a different accent or whatever, it's also valid to choose voices that have that accent instead.

Would you like your lesson recorded?

From a teacher standpoint I do believe that opting for a recording is typically beneficial but in the end it's up to you about whether you would like your recording to be taken. 

When recordings are taken they are done using the Craig discord bot. This does mean, that 100% security of the recording can't be 100% guaranteed, so please bear this in mind when deciding whether to opt for a recording. However for yours to be found by a person that would entail someone going to the effort of typing in semi-random urls. (I guess what I'm saying is 100% privacy cannot be guarnteed but you probably shouldn't assume that someone would see it either.)

What happens to recordings?

Two things happen: First, I download and process them, at this stage I keep a copy for myself so that I can use it to improve my teaching. This rarely this recording may be shared with other teachers so I can get feedback on my teaching. Second, the recording can be put up in the server, when its put in the server, it gets put in a channel that you have control over. You can control who can see it (within the limits of discord's permissions i.e. sever staff can see it).

You will be asked at the start of your lesson whether you would like your lesson to be recorded. Recording will only happen if you indicate you would like the session to be recorded.