1. Onsets and Offsets

As a musical theatre performer, student or enthusiast there is three areas you need to know. Acting, Dancing and one of the most important is singing, so naturally as a musical theatre student it is something I must dive into. 

Starting off the singing unit we have been given two songs to sing as an ensemble they are Hello from The Book of Mormon and Revolting Children from Matilda and we were also told to pick two songs, one of them can be a duet if we please. Each song is to be presented back in different stages each week. First week is 8 bars, then 16, then 32 and then the full song, this is to show confidence levels and also progress with our singing journey.

Following our songs we have also been taught different techniques we can use to push our character or help build up stability in our voice.

There you can see the different types of way you can use your voice when it comes to singing, there are two things to remember: onsets and offsets. These are ways you start a note and end a note, in these there are different ways to approach an onset and an offset.

- Glottal
- Aspirate
- Simultaneous

Onsets is how you start singing a note, it often creates the emotion that you use within the song, approaching the note with a glottal onset it means you start the note quite hard and sometimes sharp this can also be known as an attack. The exact opposite of this is aspirate, this is where you start your note softer and can sometimes have a H sound to it, very much like a whisper.

Offsets are just like onsets except it is how you end the note, glottal attacks work in the same way, you end the note very quickly and sharply - more commonly used in pop songs. Aspirate works the same way also, you end the note with almost a whisper.   

We also learnt about the scientific area of singing like what parts of our upper body are used for singing big notes? or how do I go from a head voice to a chest voice?

In this picture you can see a diagram of the body and where our vocal registers are and how we transition through them! You can see different factors such as the bridge location is how we transfer from a head voice to a chest voice. Not pictured in this diagram is also the diaphragm which is what moves when we sing, it's where people are told to singing from, if you use air from there it means you can project more.

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