Description

Katrien Van Opstal is a certified Estill Voice Training Master Trainer. She specialized in jazz and vocal technique as a jazz and pop singer in Ghent. In 2015, she earned a scholarship to the University of North Texas to study style, vocalese and lyric writing.

In January 2018, Van Opstal became a researcher at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp with the project ‘Style, Sound and Voice Production in Vocal Jazz’. This resulted in the development of the ‘Mixing Table Model’, a model to clarify vocal technique in jazz.

As a vocalist, Van Opstal was the leading lady of the Triplettes, sang with many big bands and played with national and international musicians such as Hendrik Braeckman (BE), Roni Ben-Hur (NY) and Justin Binek (KS).

Author’s description:

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 are needed for which styles?” Addressing this question resulted in the development of the Mixing Table Model. The idea of looking at the voice production system as a mixing table is truly an effective tool to analyze a sound and to choose different vocal behavior in different styles of jazz.

Use this book to 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, one can learn to explore, analyze, and choose different setups of your vocal system, and learn to apply this insight to improve vocal behavior in different jazz styles in an efficient way. The clarity and effectiveness of this Model will innovate your vocal jazz technique routine.

NEW: a corollary workbook for students is now available! The workbook can be purchased separately from the main textbook. The workbook contains exercises for student work as well as anatomical descriptions, and comes with access to a Spotify playlist of recorded examples. The workbook is available in both English and Dutch.

Physical copies of this textbook are distributed through the Dutch publisher.