Cloudglider - Passage to your Dreams as a Singer

Music has always been a passion of mine. I have never been able to get enough of it! As a child I remember going to extraordinary lengths to get enough of it - even spending hours listening to the test card on the television! (Doesn't that show my age!) I still remember the sheer magic of going to see my first opera whilst at primary school.

The passion never went away although a career in music was some way off. I even landed a job as a trainee accountant in a record company which I thoroughly enjoyed and was to provide a valuable resource for the future.

I fell into vocal coaching by accident. Like so many singing students, I initially did it to make ends meet. At the time I was practicing in a rehearsal studio surrounded by rock and punk bands ... Mozart, Puccini and Wagner soon competed with heavy metal, rock and punk! I was approached by one of the guys from one of the bands who wanted to learn to "scream" safely. Eventually it dawned on me that what I called singing he called screaming!

So that was my first pupil and more were to follow him until I had a sizeable practice and my academic studies were coming to an end. This is where my real education started. I started really researching vocal technique and ideas for myself ... watched countless gigs, concerts, shows, cabarets, tv programmes - listened to as much as I could, watched show directors and choreographers at work ... all of this teamed with trial and error and a lot of hard work I became a vocal coach. I was able to work with all age ranges, abilities and any quantity.

I see myself as a vocal coach as opposed to a teacher! Basically this is because I personally can be quite rebellious when I choose to be and I hate being told what to do and how to do it. My concept was that a singer needed someone to work along side them, vocal coaching as opposed to vocal dictation, someone who saw them as a person and not a "voice box on legs" as some singing teachers do. It's sort of a holistic approach.

Some 15 years later, I now realise that I am actually not just any old vocal coach and show director but one with an unusual skill set in vocal coaching as a result of both my own research and my personal experiences as a professional singer. The building of confidence and also motivation became the corner stones of my trade. I have a good eye for staging things and am not afraid to turn convention on its head! The years that I spent working in industry had also left me a very capable organiser and a huge dreamer!

And isn't that life is all about. Dreams! We all have them. Some of us put them on a shelf like a book to pull down and thumb through the pages in our spare time until we reach the end of the book to find it wasn't exactly what we thought it would be. Meanwhile others of us take a leap of faith and jump right in, even reading the end out of anticipation, fulfilling our expectations before the pages are written. That's Cloudglider ~ the passage to your dreams as a singer.