Sing a song, or song a sing? Who knows?? Beccy Owen does!
A few weeks ago myself and several other Jack Drum staff and freelance artists started to work with a brilliant vocalist and vocal teacher called Beccy Owen. With each of us having different ideas of what we wanted to gain from these sessions we all had the same goal to either enhance our vocal skills or to simply improve our understanding of leadership. The focus of these sessions would be for us to take part in a session that was akin to one of the sessions run by Beccy online so we could observe her in action, and hopefully pick up new skills through engagement with her practice. Skills such as keeping the conversation flowing when there is something you need to do on the tech side or dealing with latency by using speakers and backing tracks were included amongst some truly exceptional vocal techniques and exercises.
In the first session we met with Beccy and she showed us her ways of starting a session in which she asked us all our names and asked us a little bit about ourselves and also what we ate for breakfast. This set the room at ease and helped the workshop feel more lighthearted, fun and engaging. After this we focused on learning some songs and we took notes on how Beccy lead the teaching of these. One note I took from the way Beccy lead this section of the session was that she made sure we all felt included and that we were all able to take part in some form. The effectiveness of using breakfast or what ever you ate during the day was very good as everyone can relate to that so everyone was included. Beccy showed us how the use of speakers in the session to sing along to as a leader is better than using the share screen function of zoom as it took away the issue of latency and lag for participants without a huge decrease in quality provided precautions were taken in terms of the audio processing settings in the program.
We also talked about the use of song and music from other cultures, our responsibility to their places of origin and being inclusive of all races, abilities, genders and backgrounds in our own practice. We went through this because of the fact that songs do come from various backgrounds. So if we were to teach these songs we need to teach the meaning behind them such as where they came from what scenarios they were written in for example if we are teaching an African song we need to also tell people where the song is from in Africa, why it was written and who it was written by even if it wasn’t a specific person.
Not only did we talk about the actual leadership skills used in a session but we also talked about singing techniques. We did this via learning different ways to warm up the voice and how to properly exercise it without straining and damaging your vocal chords. Beccy showed us all some activities and games to play with your voice to achieve this. One of these games we enjoyed was a counting game in which we sang notes in a scale by using corresponding numbers. For example 1 being C we would start there and count 12345 whilst singing C D E F G going up the C major scale. This gradually increased in difficulty as numbers and notes were moved and we had to account for changing intervals in our voice at the same time.
In conclusion I feel that these sessions with Beccy Owen have been massively beneficial to my development as a musician and leader, and have given me more of an insight in terms of self-education, the role of an online facilitator and specifically in terms of singing. I look forward to working more with Beccy in the future as I believe I have a lot more to learn from her and her practice.