A Good Voice Coach
Many, many years ago, I had an a very good voice coach called, Stewart Pearce.
He taught me for three years at The Webber Douglas Academy of Art (alumni include Richard Boniface; Emma Chambers; Penelope Kieth; Julia Ormonde; Anthony Sher) and having studied with two Heads of Voice at RADA, I can categorically say he was better than both – hence he became Master of Voice at The Globe Theatre.
He was a very good voice coach and taught me how to play with my voice, making it resonate in different areas of my body, and allowing me to play with my voice to illicit different feelings in my listener.
He had also taught Margaret Thatcher and so my impressions of her changing the placement of her voice as to whether she was in the Parliament Chamber or on television and so talking into a pinned close mic, served me well 🙂
Learning to place your voice wherever you want, is an amazing skill and the begins with breathing exercises.
If this is of interest to you please take a look at the book called, The Alchemy of Voice which has some really good breathing exercises and resonance placement sounds.
Study of this book would be a great help to you and me, if you would like me to teach you how to play with your voice to resonate in different areas such as the chest or the pharynx, the former sounding powerful the latter sounding sexy 🙂
Of course the instructions are not as detailed and as effective as actually doing the exercises with me, but you would find this base knowledge would definitely help you and enable us – if we worked together – to work more quickly – which saves you money!
A good voice coach can change your life, Stewart Pearce was a very good voice coach and I genuinely believe I owed my theatre voice (ie ability to project within an attractive range of notes and an open warm resonant sound) to his patient drilling of our breathing exercises!
We were flat on our backs, with our hands on our ribs, nearly everyday.
If you are in business and even if you are an actor, you don’t have to be able to project as much as we did in the 1980’s ie without any electronic help, so the development of a very large rib swing to increase lung capacity isn’t quite so crucial – but a little one would be good!
I love being a good voice coach too, I care about my work and my students’ success makes me happy.
Thank you for reading.
