Beyond 4/4 Time
Thursday 28th October 2021, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM (London Time)
Vocal exercises are the bed rock of vocal practice and they can be used to develop a singer’s musicianship alongside technique. Just as a train track has two rails to stay balanced, it is proposed by the presenter that a “two-track” approach to a singer’s development would be equal emphasis on technique AND musicianship throughout training, as opposed to the more “monorail” emphasis on technique alone. To use another metaphor, we can stand on one leg but we are more balanced standing on two. As the eminent classical pedagogue, Richard Miller, sagely said: “Be first a musician and second a singer”. But how can this objective be achieved in a lesson context?
In her presentation last year – “Beyond The Major Scale” – Kim Chandler suggested that there is currently an over-emphasis and over-reliance on major scale-based patterns in vocal exercises at the expense of the appetising array of other musical patterns that vocal melodies are constructed on, e.g. scales such as the Natural Minor & the Pentatonics and modes such as the Dorian & Lydian.
This presentation is the rhythmic counterpart, suggesting that there is also an over-abundance of songs written in 4/4 time in pop repertoire at the expense of other possibilities.
From analysing and singing through pop song excerpts across the eras, this interactive workshop will introduce music based on a range of other time signatures including odd meters, compound meters, cross rhythms etc. The presenter will then show how rhythmic-based work can be applied to technically-demanding vocal exercises that are also musically challenging. This concept can be applied to any style of singing and doubles the educational value of exercises.
Kim Chandler
Kim Chandler (MMus BMusEd) is a renowned contemporary vocal coach & session singer. She runs a busy private studio in Marbella, Spain, where she coaches an elite clientele of stadium band singers, including BRIT award winners & GRAMMY nominees, artists from a range of genres, professional singers and vocal coaches online.
Sorry, this is an archived short course...
We have plenty of upcoming short courses coming soon. See details of some of them below or look at the full list of short courses.
Monday 12th January 2026
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Tuesday 13th January 2026
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Wednesday 14th January 2026
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
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12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Tuesday 20th January 2026
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Wednesday 21st January 2026
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
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Are you a voice, acting, or singing coach looking to expand your expertise and add accents and phonetics to your teaching repertoire? This 6-session course covers essential topics such as articulatory, acoustic, and auditory phonetics, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and ethical approaches to accent and dialect coaching. By the end of this course, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and practical skills to start to bring phonetics and accent coaching into your coaching and provide more comprehensive support to your clients.
Monday 12th January 2026
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
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How does the singing voice influence the speaking voice? How does the speaking voice influence the singing voice? When is there a disparate relationship between the two? Can they help each other? Can one harm the other? How can we use them positively in the voice studio. During this short course we will consider the voice as we sing and as we speak. The acquisition of language is a very interesting journey from birth through old age. We will broach the topics of “lexical” which refers to learning words, and “semantic” which is how we use words in the context of language.
Monday 12th January 2026
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
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What exactly is meant when we label ourselves or someone we know a perfectionist? It is a good to be this way? Or are you setting yourself up for failure? Can a performance psychologist or a other performance-related practitioner help you if you’re a perfectionist? In this short course, you will learn how perfectionism is defined according to popular models in clinical psychology, and whether it is maladaptive or adaptive. You will also learn how perfectionism impacts on music performance anxiety, in addition to other areas of importance for performing musicians, like work-related stress and burnout, and procrastination with one’s practice.