Profs (for basses)

In trying to find something to be grateful for every day, you pretty quickly run out of big things. It's sort of like writing an essay for English class. If you pick a broad topic you don't have much to write about. If you pick a narrow topic then you can write plenty. Today I'm grateful for a vocal exercise. Miss Cuccaro calls it "Profs for basses." I'm not sure what she means by "profs." I think she's mentioned it, but I've forgotten, though I assume it has something to do with the person that she learned it from, since most of her exercises are named that way.

So I've been trying to actually practice regularly since I've been at IU (those of you who know me from my BYU days will understandably be surprised by this development) and I've come to love this exercise. It consists of a quick run from 1-9-1 twice in a row. The trick is that you begin on an Italianate "i" and move through the vowels "e" and "a." Each vowel is used for two of the notes. Once you hit "a," the mouth position remains the same for the rest of the scale until you come back down to the notes that you use "e" and "i" for. Yes, I ended that sentence with a preposition and I don't care.

Even though the mouth position for the "a" remains the same, you mentally imagine singing "o" and "u" following the same pattern as you did for "i" and "e." While that may be gibberish if you're not a singer or closely associated with singers, but it's an amazing exercise. If my voice is out of whack, I do profs and everything lines up again. If I'm having trouble on a high note, I do profs and it's fine. I've gained at least 3 or 4 notes on my top range while maintaining my low notes, and much of that I attribute to profs. It's a panacea for vocal problems in my experience. Apparently it also helps higher voices as well, but who cares about that? So that's the thing I'm grateful for today: Profs (for basses).