<p>I really would like for ya'll to provide some comments regarding your experiences with Vocal Coaches. Please give me some feedback as to when you started working with one (e.g., age, grade, etc.), whether your experience was deemed positive or negative, what types of things they helped you work on, what to look for when selecting one, whether you worked with both a vocal coach and voice teacher, cost per hour, how often you worked with them, and basically whether you feel as though they helped you with auditions and gaining entrance into a Musical Theater program. Looking forward to your comments!</p>
<p>I don't know if I "count" to answer this, since I AM a vocal coach :) - but I remember intending to respond to an earlier post you wrote on this same subject and not having time to do so. (At least I think I didn't respond...lol...busy summer!) Anyway, a vocal coach is generally someone who helps both with selection of specific repertoire for auditions (and sometimes cabaret performances, solo concerts, etc. if you are talking about the professional NYC theatre world) and who also helps the actor prepare that material from an acting perspective - which involves what people sometimes term "lyric interp" as well as how the composer's musical choices should inform that lyric interp, the appropriate vocal style for a specific piece, and just about anything else related to the performance of the song. A good vocal coach should be COMPLETELY familiar with CURRENT professional and/or college audition trends (depending on what you hire them to do - and those are most definitely NOT the same trends). He or she may also be an expert in vocal technique and "voice building," but that is not always the case. In my experience as a performer (pre-vocal coaching days), many excellent singing technique teachers were not great at repertoire selection, either because their knowledge was very limited or because their music preferences were very limited - meaning they wouldn't steer students toward musical styles that they themselves disliked (such as pop-contemporary MT). That does students a great disservice, as the coach is being hired to BEST prepare students for a particular audition situation.</p>
<p>As a long time high school teacher (also pre-vocal coaching days), I would say that students don't really need to begin to work with a vocal coach for college audition pieces until their junior year of high school, if the purpose of working with a vocal coach is college audition prep. Any earlier and the stress of thinking of college auditions can really build - AND the students are not ready, life-experience wise, to select material that they WILL be ready for a year or even a few months later, since high school brings so many maturing experiences (dating, sometimes having to deal with unfair teachers rather than having parents intervene, etc.) However, if the student is auditioning a lot professionally or in a competitive community theatre and parents can afford it, working OCCASIONALLY with a vocal coach as early as 7th or 8th grade can really teach students the PROCESS of how to find great rep, introduce them to important MT composers and the various eras of MT composition, etc. But if a budgetary choice must be made, then by all means find a great singing TECHNIQUE teacher and encourage your child to start reading everything he or she can online about MT - theatre news websites (playbill.com, broadwaystars.com, talkinbroadway.com) are good places to start - and try to develop a sensibility for the MT repertoire that exists (NOT just current shows). MT is a relatively young discipline (only about 80 years old, if you count SHOWBOAT as the first "musical"), so it really is possible to become quite expert about the entire MT body of work, since the amount of material IS finite - unlike play literature, which goes back to the time of the ancient Greeks and takes much longer to understand and explore comprehensively. This reading will help your child begin to become an MT rep expert - and then when college auditions are closer you can hire a vocal coach if necessary - but by then, your child may be great at picking out his or her own rep that's not overdone and is appropriate to his or her type, etc. </p>
<p>A vocal coach should charge as much as vocal technique teachers in your geographic area, and more if that coach does music prep for you (transposition, transcription, etc.). And like voice teachers, there is no "official" credential or qualification to be a vocal coach - so try them out and check references, word of mouth, etc. (As you are doing here!) The best vocal coaches have really varied backgrounds - some came to coaching as singers, some as pianists, some as directors, etc. But what they share is expert knowledge of MT rep, astute ears for matching voices to songs very quickly (as in, nearly immediately :) ), music libraries filled with rare and unpublished songs (as well as better-known things), and the resources to track down songs which they don't themselves have in their possession.</p>
<p>Hope this helps!</p>
<p>Hi - and thanks for your timely response.... We live near Athens, Georgia and have access to University folks. I have spent some time researching vocal coaches in our area. I have even sat down with one and she reviewed some DVD's of my daughters past performances. My daughter will start high school tomorrow. We are actively involved in community theater. This year they are offering HONK!, You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, and Thoroughly Modern Millie. We already have our daughter working with the Voice Chair at UGA. He is great! He has little experience though in Musical Theater. We are interested in hiring a vocal coach to help out with presentation skills, characterization - how to act the part! We know that we'll end up hiring one later in her high school career. We really are wondering if it would help to see how a coach might help with the upcoming auditions. The coach I have been talking with is in the Theater department at UGA and performed on Broadway years ago - Miss Saigon. Any thoughts?</p>
<p>The UGA theatre faculty member may be a great coach - hard to tell just by his credits, though. Some Bway performers are fantastic coaches and some aren't - it depends on their own skill as a singing actor (not what everyone is hired to do, of course), and perhaps even more, on their ability to TEACH a process. Without the teaching skill and sensibility of how to make instruction work for a student, especially a younger one, all of the expertise in the world can't be effectively conveyed. Presumably a university faculty person would be a great teacher, but as all of us who have gone to college know, that's not always the case! ;) But it sounds like you have great potential with the UGA faculty.</p>