So where were we? Gillyanne & Jeremy talk past successes and future plans

We've been off the air for two months - so where were we? And where are we going?
In this opening episode for Season 8, we reveal our future plans for singers, singing teachers, choral leaders and theatre MDs

00:00 Our 80th podcast episode!
01:05 Our Teacher Accreditation Programme
02:14 Our discoveries on the Discovery Calls
06:10 SIXTY contact hours
07:32 Changes to our online singing teacher courses
08:45 In-person appearances and masterclasses
12:33 Podcast guest and AI
15:36 The inspiration for our articles
19:50 Getting angry over nothing
22:16 Going for a singing teacher job interview
23:24 MusicalCon in London
24:52 This Is A Voice has been honoured

We mention multiple resources so the link list this week is long.
Make sure to check everything out!

Blog - More Than Just Content Creators? https://vocalprocess.co.uk/more-than-...

The Accreditation Programme Discovery calls https://www.cognitoforms.com/VocalPro...

12 Hours To Better Singing Teaching online course https://vocalprocess.co.uk/teacher-ac... 

Northwest Voice CEN Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/applied-vocal-skills-client-relevant-strategies-with-vocal-process-tickets-710673061257 

Pro-vox masterclass https://www.instagram.com/p/Cu1HeLbsNI9/

Hamburger Stimmsymposium https://hamss.de/anmeldung/

Jeremy’s ChatGPT video on YouTube https://youtu.be/Yd0t9fP7JPU?si=7Sor_4-acgxlt2Bp

Rayvox https://www.rayvox.co.uk/products/voice-journal?ref=VOCALPROCESS

Transcript

This is A Voice, a podcast with Dr Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.

Hello and welcome to This Is A Voice, Season 8, Episode 1. 

The podcast where we get vocal about voice. 

I'm Jeremy Fisher. 

And I'm Dr Gillyanne Kayes 

And this is actually episode 80 of this podcast. 

Gosh, you know, I just can't believe it. 

We didn't really expect to do 80 episodes when we started this.

 I'm so thrilled.

Well, today, people, it's a kind of general catch up because it's that time of year, isn't it? When everybody's getting started again, back on the horse. So we wanted to catch you up with what we're up to. Maybe get a little bit of input from you as to, one aspect of something that we do. 

Absolutely. So we've been, we've actually been off the air for a couple of months.

Mm-hmm. So there's been quite a lot going on in the background and we have quite a lot of plans coming up. So, okay. Where do we start? 

Um, shall we just talk about the Accreditation Programmeme, which is almost finished now for Cohort22. Absolutely full of joy. Do check out what they've been saying on social media because they've reached a fabulous point in their training right now.

They're ready to rock and roll. 

Absolutely. So we have our last session with them just coming up. We've started to do career advice for them. I mean, there's all sorts of things going on there. Cohort21 are almost finishing their first year of 

As registered teachers. 

As registered teachers, yes. 

And it's been so good to see them grow in that sort of further 12 months.

And we just love the sense of warmth and community between them and we just can't wait to merge Cohort22 with Cohort21. 

We're hoping very much that this is not going to be like merging the chickens where they all kill each other. 

No, no, it won't be, it won't be. And you know, and on it goes because we are finalizing our cohort for Cohort23.

Yes. which in fact starts on the 8th of October. This has been quite, 

yeah, it's been quite interesting, hasn't it? 

I'm still doing Discovery Calls with people who are eligible to do it. Yeah. So apparently, you know, in 2023, late booking is the new normal. 

Oh, last minute. Last, last, last minute. 

And do you know, there's something really interesting we've discovered about the way that we've, we've morphed actually, since we first created our Online Singing Teacher Training during the pandemic years, and where we ended up with the Accreditation, uh, because as some of you will know, we have now created a Teacher Pathway, which is self guided for most of it. 

And this is new this year. 

Absolutely. And what we've discovered with people who've been on that Teacher Pathway is that they're getting a little bit worried that when they do the Accreditation itself, it's going to be pre recorded stuff and all self guided.

Mm hmm. Oh no it isn't. 

It really isn't. We should maybe set the scene for this. When we first put this pathway together, which was two, three years ago, and we had It was originally then called the Online Singing Teacher Training Weeks 1, 2 and 3. 

And hundreds of you have done this. Yeah, we know.

And then we changed it to the 12 Hours To Better Singing Teaching, 12 MORE Hours To Better Singing Teaching, and the Accreditation Gateway. Mm-hmm. what's been so fascinating is that when we did the OSTTs, that, that was, we started those during the pandemic. So everybody had so much time. They were at home, they had the opportunity to do all the training, and so every bit of that was live.

And it was live on Zoom, live online. Uh, when we got out of the pandemic, people started to get absolutely full with their timetables and what they were looking for was a course that they could dip in and out of on their own timing. So we turned all of those, certainly the first two weeks, into completely online courses so that you could visit whenever, you could come at 3 in the morning if you wanted to and everything was there.

It was all chopped up so you could do a five minute video, you could spend 20 minutes, you could spend two hours. 

Captions, transcripts. 

Everything. 

And also, you know, everybody has 12 months access and you know how valuable that is if you have that kind of content that you can revisit, refresh. And we had one person contact us actually saying.

I know my 12 months is up, but I really, really want to do another three months because I know that there's stuff in there I need to revisit. I'm not saying we're going to do that for everybody, but on this case by case basis, we, we did in this instance, and they are absolutely thrilled, aren't they?

They are. so what was interesting is that, and this often happens when you put something absolutely brand new together, or, you know, there hasn't been anything out there before, like it is that you discover that occasionally there are flaws in it. And this is flight correction. We do flight correction a lot because flight correction is so important.

So we, what we discovered was that because it was a completely online. experience, that people were worried when they came to basically to move up into the Accreditation Programme that it was all going to be online, it was all going to be pre recorded videos, and they wouldn't actually get the in person, in the room, one to one, group to one, us to group, the whole sort of interaction thing.

And that's, that's not the case. 

And that's because they hadn't had that experience. And this is why it's so important that we understand that part of education must be experiential. And as a matter of fact, we wrote a blog about it, but we'll come to that. We'll come to the blogs in a moment. So what I want to, do to finish this thought for people is first of all to say, I am still offering Discovery Calls, even until the middle of next week.

So if you're interested in discovering what the Accreditation experience is like, please do get in touch. I'd be very happy to chat with you. 

We'll put the link for your calendar for the Discovery calls on the show notes. 

But for the in person training, what we call contact hours. albeit in zoom room. You have 48 hours of training across those 12 months.

And that's all all live online. 

And your cohort colleagues, which means that we can, everything that you're learning about, we can answer questions about. Everything that you're learning about, we can say, hey, this is how you purpose it, or we can say, great. Okay, so you're getting it. Now let's have someone try it out. Let's hear it. So you've got those 48 hours, plus you also get a one to one mentoring session, which we call the accountability sessions. They're scheduled as 45 minutes each. 

I was gonna say don't make me laugh. No, we don't do 45 minutes. We end up never doing 45 minutes. If you're listening, 

always more. If you're just listening, my headphones nearly fell off there with the idea that it would only be 45 minutes. But what's so good about this is that you get one to one all the way through. So we're talking 60 contact hours. And just for anyone who knows what it's like to do a master's Programme that is triple? 

You don't get 60 contact hours.

Get triple taught hours that you get in a master's Programme Yep. Anyway, so, that was a really interesting, it's been an interesting journey for us, hasn't it? So now what is it that we're going to do? As a result of that, are we going to tell them or are we saving it for another podcast? 

No, I think we can tell them. I think we tell them this is what's going to happen in the future.

Because of these Discovery calls, because people are, thank you for telling us, you know, we really appreciate when you go, this isn't quite working for me, you know, what can you do?

We are going to change the way that we run the 12 Hours To Better Singing Teaching and the 12 MORE Hours To Better Singing Teaching courses.

The Gateway course, the Accreditation Gateway, already has some of this in it, so we're not going to change that one. But these first two courses, we are going to add a live element to them. So we're going to do a Q&A, which is going to be live, and anybody on that course can join it. 

You're going to have tasks.

Yes, we've got other things that you can do, we've got submissions. There are a lot of other things which gives you more of the experience of working with us live. And that's all we're going to say. 

So if you've done those courses or you're doing those courses and this sounds good to you, would you please let us know?

Yes. Because we're actually pretty excited about it. 

So that's the Accreditation Programme It is swinging at the moment. It's going well. So, we start again in October. Yeah. 

Okay. We're talking about personal contact and the importance of, of in person, experiential things as part of education. We have three in person events scheduled at the moment, don't we?

And this, this is real in person and we're going to be in the room. Yeah. Rather than just on Zoom. 

Two of them are in Liverpool as it happens. Which is very funny. The first one coming up. is the Northwest CEN. And what does the acronym stand for? It's 

Northwest Voice CEN, which is Voice Clinical Excellence Network.

And that's happening on the 16th of November. Yeah. And so this is a training that we're doing for speech and language therapists and trainee speech and language therapists, who have a special interest in voice. 

I have to say, we love doing this. We love working with speech language therapists, we've done loads of them.

We've done loads, yeah. Okay. The last in person one we did was just before the pandemic. 

A couple of days, I think, before we were locked down. 

Yeah, it was, it was. And the title is Applied Vocal Skills for Client Relevant Strategies. 

So if you're a, uh, an SLT or a trainee SLT or SLP, Please either contact us to find out more about it or look out for the Northwest Voice CEN.

Well, what we'll do is we'll put the link that they've already posted for Eventbrite and I'm, you know, we can't say exactly who it is who's eligible to attend. But, you know, we wanted to flag it. Yes. Okay, so very soon after that we are going back again to, Provox and we're so thrilled there.

To Carrie Birmingham's organization. 

Yes. Okay. And we are doing a masterclass called Finding the You in Every Song. Yeah. Have I given the date? 19th. Sunday the 19th of November. Yes. and actually we're looking forward to being Carrie's new studio because we haven't seen it. 

We haven't. We went to the old one.

Since we went, we last went. Now I've got to tell you that at the moment there are only waiting places for the singers. Apparently this booked up within a week of being advertised, so that's always a good feeling. But there are, a small number of places for observers. For observers, yeah. So if you're a teacher, or a vocal coach and you want to see how it is that we roll when we give a masterclass, do check in because it's great learning for you.

And we're always interested in those little moments where we can say, well, the reason why we did this with this person here is because. 

And the last, the last masterclass that we did there, we were covering contemporary musical theatre, we were covering contemporary commercial music, so it's quite a wide range of repertoire.

Mm 

hmm. Should be fun. 

Love working there, so thank you for that invite, Carrie Simone. And 

then there's a third one which is... There's quite a bit in the future that we thought we'd tell you anyway, which is the HAM Symposium, or MEVOC, which is the Medical Voice Centre in Hamburg. 

No, no, it's not called MEVOC, it's the HAM Symposium, which will be held at the Medical Voice Centre, acronym MEVOC, or MEVOC.

I stand corrected. You do? Publicly, how dare you? 

And again, we are so thrilled, because originally we were going to go there much earlier, but guess what happened in between? Yes. Okay, so we're delighted to be going there. Can't give you details about what we're doing yet, but the dates for the event itself are the 19th to the 21st of April, and it's in Hamburg, which is a fabulous city.

We can give you one detail, which is it's the day After my 62nd birthday, all cards and presents welcome. 

So we're thinking about celebrating Jeremy's birthday in Hamburg. Absolutely, that'd be fun. Yeah, okay, good. Anyone want to arrange birthday celebrations for us? We are open to it. Yes. Okay. Well, let's talk a bit more about podcast and what's upcoming.

We have our very first guest already scheduled. Yes. And it is the wonderful Karen Merstick Michaels, who is our social media manager. 

Karen is great. She, first of all, incredibly knowledgeable about social media and also specifically social media for singers, singing teachers, voice coaches, choral leaders, I mean people who work in the music industry.

Yeah, because she's in the music industry herself. She is. And she's been our social media manager for a while and she's just a wonderful human to connect with as well, you know. Karen, we appreciate you. 

Absolutely. Absolutely. and we have a very specific topic. It's actually a very exciting topic for me, which is ChatGPT and AI.

Now, Karen has been teaching us how to use ChatGPT. And of course, Jeremy, he's an early adopter of everything. Uh, and he's kind of grabbed it and absolutely run with it. And it is great fun. sometimes if you don't give it the right information. 

Always. Always. If you don't give it the right instructions, it's weird.

It can come out very histrionic. And didn't you do a little video? 

I did. I did. Yeah, it's on YouTube. Go and have a look at it. It's like the, this is the standard version, which is the sort of intellectual, uh, version. What I did was I got it to describe a one minute YouTube short, uh, and I got it to describe it in a sort of slightly intellectual way.

And I got it to... Describe it in a clickbait way. And the clickbait way is hilarious. 

And you have to go because apparently the best thing that our watchers responded to was the way that Jeremy did the emoticons with his face. I love that. Can we put that in the show notes? So people can find it easily.

It's so worth watching. 

Okay, so, but Karen will be talking about the value of ChatGPT and how to use it and how she uses it for social media to make life easier. 

It's one of those things that this is, not only is this not going to go away, but this is going to become the norm. 

So you have to learn how to embrace it rather than going, oh, it's going to take away, you know, our authorship.

I mean, hey, you're talking to prolific authors and we're saying it's okay to embrace it. Absolutely right. and, uh, do you want to say a bit about AI, artificial... intelligence, because, 

I have no idea what to say. Where are you going? 

No, nowhere. 

Where are you going with this? 

That's why we're doing the podcast.

Absolutely. Well, let's, let's leave Karen and me to chat about it on the podcast, rather than me revealing anything. 

So you're doing it on your own, you two? 

No, no, no, you're, you're just sitting there and going, oh, yes, that's nice. 

Okay, that's lovely. Wonderful. Right. And we will be having more podcast guests, but we're not going to tell you who they are.

I am going to get so much grief for that. 

You have been blogging. I've been blogging, but you blog a lot more than I do. everybody, Jeremy can write a blog in half an hour. 

Start to finish from the, uh, the germ of the idea. Off it goes. And do you know what? It's often very nearly perfect. 

Do you know what's so interesting?

And it's such a beautiful segue is we've been just been talking about ChatGPT and AI. And now we're going on to blogs and articles. And there's a very interesting area. Yeah, which is ChatGPT can help you, or any of the AI tools can help you to write blogs much faster. What is so fascinating, and I know people are not going to believe this, but I write every article myself.

There is one article which we've done fairly recently, which I wrote it, and then we ran it through ChatGPT and hated it, and then we ran it through it again with different instructions and it was slightly better. So I incorporated a couple of paragraphs into it. 

Excuse me. I wrote most of that and then you edited it for me.

Gillyanne is quite right. You see, I'm going to get grief for that as well, but that's justified. Yeah, you're quite right. 

And that's the one that was called, is called, Are We Just Content Creators? Yes. And it was something I felt very passionate about. And actually, it's very relevant to what we just talked about, isn't it, with the Teacher Pathway, Jeremy?

Because at the moment, a lot of it is content. And I got very passionate about the idea that education, true education, is actually a community of inquiry. And I honestly think that that is what we foster and what we do. So if you haven't seen that blog, please do go and have a look at it and let us know what you think.

We've got another set of blogs coming out now. I have written all these. 

He has. 

I really have. 

All on his own. 

But this was really interesting. we've got one called translating vocal technique terms, and this came out of a, an Accreditation, uh, one to one with Monia de Swart, who's on Cohort22 at the moment. 

Who lives in the Netherlands and therefore is Dutch speaking.

Absolutely. So she, uh, she teaches in mostly in Dutch, but occasionally in English, partly for us so that we know what she's doing. And, it was very interesting because we had a long conversation about the problem of translating terms into a different language. And honestly, there is also a problem with translating terms, even into your own language, when somebody does, uh, industry jargon and you go, it's got a very specific meaning in this area or in this, in this industry.

But actually, those words don't even mean the same thing when you're talking standard English situations. So, I... 

Or to people in other communities. That's what it boils down to. I think communities do obviously evolve their, you know, special terms that relate to them. For instance, legato. You know, if you were to, to man in the street, person in the street, 

legato, you know, isn't, isn't legato a game?

Yeah, it could be a game. 

Yeah. It was from that conversation that I came away and I thought there's an article in this, this is information that really needs to get out to people is the meaning of words isn't always obvious and at the moment you translate it into a different language, sometimes you don't even have similar words to translate it into, so you're, you're using an entirely different meaning.

Um, and that was one of the articles where I sat down and I wrote it from top to bottom in half an hour. That's, I have to say, it's a little unusual. Normally it takes me, you know, a couple of goes to get an article right. You've got to remember I've written 500 of them. This is one of those, you know, the more you do it the more you get into a flow.

And the other really important thing is you have to know who you're writing for and what it is that you want to get across. So just little writing tips there. So that's coming out, I think, I think, I think by the time this podcast goes out, it will just be out. So do go and check on the vocalprocess.co.uk website under, news and media slash blogs. 

Yeah. And Jeremy, can I just flag as well, that if people are interested in that sort of thing, they need to sign up for the newsletter because they are going to get this information earlier than anybody else. And it's totally worth it. 

Absolutely. And, uh, if you go on, I think, almost any page on the vocalprocess.co.uk website, you can sign up for the newsletter. 

Hmm, can we put that in the links as well? 

We certainly can. 

Show notes, yay! 

Okay, we've got another one called, Getting Angry Over Nothing. 

I can't remember what this is about. It can't have been anything to do with me. 

It actually was . It was really, really interesting because we've had, 

I seriously can't remember the context.

Yeah, no. The moment I tell you about it, you'll remember it. Okay. Uh, we have had some tough weeks over the last few weeks mm-hmm. Where we've had all sorts of issues coming at us from, from the house, from the business, from, you know, all sorts of things have been going on.

 There's so much growth and change going on.

Yes. Often when you are in a major period of growth, there's a lot of things that get presented to you that you go, Oh, that's how I used to deal with it. And now I have to deal with it differently. And that can be awkward. 

And you can experience discomfort.

Absolutely. We have been experiencing discomfort. 

Are you going to remind me what 

did I get angry about? 

Okay, it was very interesting. 

We were on a walk and we were talking about misunderstanding or heightened emotions and I said, hang on, there's an article in here and we switched on otter. ai which is the recording app that also transcribes and we recorded and transcribed something and I went, there's a whole article in here.

which is all about misunderstanding, heightened emotions, reacting to all sorts of things, and that often there's another layer of meaning underneath that reaction, and it's that layer of meaning that needs dealing with, not the thing that you're reacting to. 

You've got to drill down. I, uh, drill down. I remember now that it was because, I'd sent a communication and I didn't get the result that I expected, that I was looking for.

And, Then I kind of, so I was cross about that initially I thought, oh, why isn't this happening? And then I looked at the communication I sent out and I thought, oh, I can see. It wasn't very clear. So the real reason why I was angry was because I was angry with myself. Yeah. 'cause I felt I'd dropped the ball.

And if you add those two things together, then you can get more angry. And because we were on the walk, uh, as a matter of fact, we often have power walks together, don't we, where we say, what are we doing this week? because I was talking to Jeremy about it, we began to unpack and drill down. Yeah, 

I haven't got a date to put that out yet, but it is written. And then we've got another one, which I'm considering sending out, which again, came from a mentoring session on the Accreditation Programme, and this was for Cohort21, and it's called going for a singing teacher job interview.

Yeah. And we were talking about all the targets that you have to hit and some of the targets that in fact you think you have to hit and you don't, and how you deal with the whole process of going into a job interview as a musician or as a singer or as an instrumentalist or as a theoretist, whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and the sort of things that you go through and the emotions that you go through and how you deal with them. I think it's quite an interesting article, so if you want me to publish that, it is sitting in the background, still not sure about it, uh, let us know.

 I think that'd be super useful for people, to be honest.

And in fact, just on the back of that, what... would you like us to write about? If you have any specific things like, you know, we can unpack a technique or we can unpack a situation or we just, you know, give our opinions on various things, if you want us to write about something, please do let us know. We're always open to that.

Translate pedagogical concepts or a bit of voice science or whatever. Yes. 

There's one more thing that I just want to flag. And again, this is not until October the 21st, 22nd. And this is MusicalCon in London. This is its second year. I think it's his second year? It is. And we didn't go to last year, but our great friend and colleague Oren Boder of Rayvox went to it last year and said it was amazing.

He had a ball. 

He had a ball there. And, he's going again this year and he is publishing a sort of free newspaper. And he said, would I write something for it? And I went, yeah, I can write something for it. Well, 35 minutes later, I had an article. And again, it was because I knew exactly who the target market was.

I knew exactly what it was that I wanted to say. And I didn't know what I was going to write. when you have that clarity of target you just sit down and you go I'm just going to start writing and there it was and in fact I don't think I've changed a word in it since then it's like that was a one off.

So if you're a musical theatre fan or a musical you know someone who works in in in education uh in that area for musical theatre um go along to the MusicalCon because I gather it's a really um fun event. 

It's amazing. Um the article is about advice on what to sing at auditions, but I'm afraid I can't tell you any more about it and we're not publishing it either.

You have to go to MusicalCon and get that paper. 

You do indeed, yeah, so head out to Rayvox if you go there. 

And again, uh, we'll put the MusicalCon, uh, links in the show notes. 

So we have one more really exciting piece of information for you, and it's about podcasts.

Yes, we have been added to the wonderful NATSCast group of podcasts. 

And NATS is the National Association of Teachers of Singing, and that's the American organization. 

And they have selected a very select few actually. 

A VERY Select Few. We are thrilled.

Podcasts produced by NATS members. And we're members of NATS. And can I just read this? NATS is pleased to present this group of podcasts offering quality resources for voice teachers and singers. And we are up there with the Full Voice, uh, full Voice podcast, which is Nikki Loney, VocalFri from Nicholas Perna. That's very interesting. 

CollabPiano.

Lovely. Natalie Sherer. We don't know that presenter, so we must check them out. 

The Business Savvy Singer with Greta Pope. Yeah. Your Creative GPS with the wonderful Karen Merstik-Michaels, who we'll be interviewing next month. And then us. And then This Is A Voice. We're thrilled. So thank you very much, NATSCast. 

I think we're almost wrapped, but there is one thing that we, a personal thing really, that we wanted to share with you. Yes. How long is it since you had a vocal massage or have you ever had one?

20 years, something like that. 

I haven't had one since, do you remember swine flu? 

Ooh, that's going back a couple of centuries.

 Mm hmm. I think 2009 or something like that. And I remember heading out to PEVOC and I didn't realize I had swine flu. And I did. I got teased by all the doctors saying, look, she's coughing every 12 minutes. She's got it. Anyway, because I'd, I'd actually been coughing for about . 

Should we, should we get to the point ? 

No, because I'd been coughing for two months. I actually needed a bit of help, so that was my last vocal massage. Massage. So here we are now in 2023 and we are heading out later this month to go and have our first vocal massage for ages with the wonderful Carrie Garrett at her singer's clinic in Worcestershire.

The clinic is probably just about over, just over an hour from us.

That's. It's gonna be an easy journey. It's gonna be lovely to see Carrie in the flesh again. 

Highly specialist, speech and language therapist and, uh, who's recently refreshed her skills in vocal massage. 

And, uh, Carrie has done a couple of podcasts for us, so we'll put the links to those in the show notes as well so you can hear who we're talking about.

Mm, absolutely. 

And how we chat. 

Lots and lots of wisdom. 

Well, I think that's it. That's quite a lot going on. There is more, but we might save that for the next podcast. So, we'll chat soon. See you later. Bye. 

Bye bye, everyone.

This is A Voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. This is A Voice.