Day 167: the squeaky door.

The other day at my singing lesson I learnt an exercise called the squeaky door. It involves making sort of nasal squeaky graunchy noises through the front of your face while doing various scales or arpeggios or triads. Sounds weird, is amazing. Doing it sort of feels like you're polishing metal. The notes are the metal and you polish your way from one to the next in little lilting squeaks. It allows you to go from register to register without any apparent vocal break, which for me right now is an awesome thing. I'm sorry, I'm probably speaking gobbledegook. But for the next at least four weeks, I'll be spending my Friday nights - not drinking - but using exercises like that one to open my own often squeaky door into new vocal territory. In plain English, I have decided to honour the original intent of my non-drinking mission by devoting some of my Friday nights to singing lessons. And now I'm going home to practise some more squeaky door.