Soul Singing course with simisola

Gain a general understanding about the history of Soul and it’s place in music today. Throughout the course we will touch on the evolution of soul and apply this to vocal approaches and exercises.

This session will be used to establish your current vocal ability. We will begin to build on techniques and develop muscle memory surrounding melodic styles used within soul music.

Focusing on the various stylistic approaches of singers throughout the history of soul we will begin to practise the approaches needed to achieve these sounds as well as establish how to make these sounds your own.

A key feature of soul music is its experimental melodic lines – range playing a big role in this. We will begin to develop your vocal range and apply this to repertoire.

We want those power notes sounding full and rich! In this session we will work on techniques to achieve chest voice in safe, sustainable and healthy way.

Developing mix and head voice will create more potential to add various vocal textures to your repertoire.

Begin to train the voice and ear to pick up on the quick nature of riffs as we work on flexibility and agility. In addition to understanding the impact riffing can have, we will touch on the commercialisation of riffing within Soul.

Build on strengthening the core to develop stamina for both ballads and up-tempo songs. Continue to cultivate your own specific tone.

In this session we will be working on how to deconstruct a song in order to create more a more in-depth vocal performance.

Working on making the song your own. Whilst experimenting with tempo and phrasing, we will touch on different versions of the same songs within the Soul genre and the effects they have.

We will look at how improvisation is used within Soul while acquiring techniques and pitch accuracy needed to execute improvisation effectively.

Emotion plays a special role in Soul in particular. We will establish and work on approaches used to connect emotionally with a song in order to create a more fulfilling performance for yourself and the audience.

Movement and gesture can aid a performance and help with storytelling and connection to audience. We will analyse artists’ performances and apply this to your own performance.

Time to put everything we have learnt together and reflect on what you have learnt.