Katrien Van Opstal

Jazz singers come into contact with many jazz styles throughout their career. How they use their voice and build their sound palette in these styles can be very different from one style to another. Diana Spradling, one of the first researchers to investigate the link between voice timbre and jazz style, notes: “Not all jazz sounds alike! Singing a bebop tune requires different skills of a singer than does singing a ballad or a swing tune”. Inspired by her quote, our question became: “Which skills for which styles?”. Answering this question resulted in the development of the Mixing Table Model.

The idea of looking at the voice production system as a mixing table proved to be an effective tool to analyze a sound and to choose different vocal behavior in different styles of jazz. 

In this book, you discover how to hear, feel, train, and choose different anatomical aspects of your voice like your true vocal folds, thyroid cartilage, or soft palate. With the visual aid of the Mixing Table Model (MTM) you learn to explore, analyze, and choose different setups of your vocal system. You learn to apply this insight to improve your vocal behavior in different jazz styles in an efficient way. The clarity and effectiveness of this Model will innovate your vocal jazz technique routine.