You're a good teacher.
Nobody says that to you often enough, so let's start there.
You listen well. You care about the humans in your studio. You've built something real, and your singers keep coming back.
And still. A student walks in wanting to belt something from the show everyone's auditioning for this season, or riff the way the artist on their playlist does, and some quiet part of you thinks: I can make this sound better. I'm not totally sure I could tell you why.
So you fix it by feel. It usually works. But "usually" is a hard thing to build a career on, and feel is a hard thing to teach a student to trust in themselves.
That gap isn't a flaw in you. It's a gap in the curriculum you were handed.
I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE THAT GAP IS, BECAUSE I WENT LOOKING FOR IT.
I'm Maddie. Northern Utah voice teacher and vocologist currently based out of the Ogden, UT area and all over the globe online.
I did the degrees. A BA in Musical Theatre from Weber State University. An MFA in Acting from the University of Central Florida. An MM in Voice Pedagogy, Commercial Contemporary Track, from Shenandoah University — where I taught for their musical theatre and commercial contemporary music programs 7 years.
I'm listing those for one reason: they're the receipts on a specific claim. I've seen what a voice degree covers. I've also seen precisely where it stops, and how far that is from the singer sitting in front of you on a Tuesday afternoon.
My private studio runs online and in person in Ogden, Utah. The singers in it work on and off Broadway, on national tours, and regional theaters. They sing musical theatre, pop, rock, jazz, and R&B — often several of those in the same week, because that's the job now.
And for the last several years, I've been teaching the teachers. Hundreds of them, certified through Voice Function 101 and Mechanics of Mix & Belt, with a smaller group going all the way through the year long Pro Teacher Certification. They're professors at NYU Tisch, Pace, and UVU. They're private studio owners in Hawaii and New York and everywhere in between.
They came for the same reason you're reading this.
No dogma. Options over absolutes. Humans first.
Voice science has a bad habit of arriving with a wagging finger: here are the new rules, here's what you've been doing wrong, here's the one right way. I'm not interested in handing you a longer list of rules. I'm interested in handing you a clearer ear.
Which is why the thing my teachers say most isn't "I learned a lot." It's that it never made them feel stupid. One almost didn't enroll because perfectionism made trying feel dangerous. A professor with more degrees than most people will ever need said the tone never once talked down to him.
That's the whole design. The goal was never for you to teach like me — it's for you to hear more precisely, choose more deliberately, and trust your own instincts, with anatomy and motor learning underneath them instead of vibes and hope.