Phil Gyford

This term I’ve also been taking a ‘Technical Voice Production’ class on Monday evenings with Irene Bradshaw. My voice is one of the things I need to work on most — although I can’t easily tell what it sounds like, I at least realise it’s often too quiet, it croaks out from the back of my throat and I don’t feel I have enough control over it for performing.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the past ten weeks or so have brought a radical transformation. I just didn’t quite get it, and although I’m now aware of a load of exercises one can do to improve the voice’s power and precision, I was missing something. One should be able to bring the voice “forward” and feel its vibrations around the front of the face, but not for me — it just sits there, hiding away, keeping its vibrations to itself.

The thing I liked least about the class was some of the preliminary relaxation — I’m fine with relaxing, but lying down and imagining ourselves filling with rainbow colours or walking through a magical garden to a large oak tree… Pfffff. It reminded me of when I was trying to find a decent yoga class and had to endure a couple of awful sessions which required more tolerance for new age music than actual effort. Eventually I found one with the right balance of exercise and little talk of inner calm or spirits or whatever else the others went on about.

But anyway, still work to do, voice-wise.