This year, I bit the bullet and gave a "voice techniques for folk singers" workshop at the Tucson Folk Festival. Happily it went really well. Last winter, I wrote into Mudcat with my early ideas for the workshop, so I thought I'd give you the update.

First of all, it was well attended (21 people). I was worried that few would attend, because when I personally mention vocal techniques to people who sing trad or folk, I often get a luke warm response. Also, I have never given it before, so there was no precedent. While walking down to the workshop site, my seven year old assured me that she would be there to listen, even if no one else came. That reassurance in hand, I went for it.

Based on the attendance, I think there is a real interest in this type of workshop out there. Half, or more, of the attendees had sung in bands or in some semi-professional capacity - so they had a vested interest in the things I taught, which made it easier. Many of them added comments and participated in the discussion.

I had broken the workshop down into 4 topics, breath support (breathing deeply, quickly, and using catch breaths), singing on the vowels (easy and hard ones) and the affect of consonants(voiced and unvoiced), focussing your singing (learning to resonate in your face), and song interpretation. These topics were also covered in the handout I distributed.

The bad news was that (no surprise) it was to much info for the hour time slot. But not as much too much as I thought it might be. I think I could have done it, if I had actually had the whole hour. People arrived over about the first 10 minutes of time and I made 2 time sucking mistakes, which I will pass on. 1) I repeated my opening statements to new commers as they trickled in, 2) I had everyone introduce themselves and say a bit about what type of music they sing. While introductions are nice, getting all the info would have been nicer.

Next time, I will also rearrange the material slightly, get more examples of songs that illustrate certain problem consonants, and cut out some of the song interpretation examples that I had prepared, but didn't get to do. Instead I would use single lines from familiar songs and have them sing them so that they get the body feeling for things. I did some of that, but not enough.

Even though I didn't get to everything, what I did cover seemed to resonate (excuse the pun) with people. I got a lot of good feedback and now I am psyched to do it again.   

Claire