Singing Voice Training with David Delaney

I have been singing all my life and I was not satisfied with my sound until I learned to use my whole body in my singing and stop doing something differently when I was speaking than when I was singing.  I always ‘knew’ what my singing potential was, but always felt like I could never get off the ground, let my voice soar when I was in front of others.

After I graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York CIty, and I had already studied with a number of different voice teachers at this point, I was introduced to Margaret Laughlin Riddleberger known by her students as ‘Mizzar’ (as in Ms. R).  She died of cancer in the summer of this year, 2009; she will be missed by many who she taught to use their voices in ways they might not have ever discovered otherwise.

Around 1979 she began coming to New York City a two days a week to work with actors and I was lucky enough to be able to get into her Voice Training Studio.  She had sung at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC along with having worked in the theatre and in Supper Clubs, and she and her husband owned a theater called the Callaban in the Washington D.C. area. She had studied singing with a woman who taught her the method that came from the Bel Canto, a school of voice in Italy used in the opera.

She made a big impact on my life.

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Dr. Marifiotti tells of the Bel Canto School of physiological voice training in his book- click the link below.

(See Marifiotti’s book.

Singing and speaking are different from each other, right?

After I began to see the difference between what I thought singing was and what it really was, I quickly realized that personality stress, tension in the body, and lack of a scientific understanding of the vocal apparatus is what prevents us from discovering our natural power and resonance. Singing is natural for a human unless we have some block to it. This lead me to be trained in anatomy, physiology, physics, and massage therapy in NYC and eventually to be trained and certified in an advanced body approach called the Rolfing® Method of Structural Integration.

For twenty years I was a ‘go to guy’ in N.Y.City for singers/actors/dancers who needed help in unlocking their bodies to free their voice.  Margaret strongly encouraged all her students to come to me, for 20 years, as well as all her Washington, D.C. singers.  This opened up my career in helping singers unlock their bodies from the tension that they had acquired over the course of their life- and didn’t know they had.

On top of my acting and singing work, I developed and performed a one-man show in New York City entitled, “Love, Desire, and Growing Pains” and this was my vehicle for using all that I had learned in my singing studies. I performed this show over the course of five years.

I left New York City in 2002 and am now living and working in the Boulder/Denver, Colorado area. I am also a trained and licensed psychotherapist and work with the effects of trauma and show folks how to resolve it.  Stress, tension or fear, whatever word we use, has the effect of placing the small muscles of respiration, the singers muscles or movement muscles, or also called the muscles of initiation, into contraction and this is precisely when we lose our natural ability to sing in our own voice with its unique qualities and resonance.  We lose our elasticity basically.

I love singing and I love passing this knowledge on to those who wish to perform for live audiences. There is a joy in learning how to access your natural singing power and resonance without ever hurting your throat.  It is essentially muscle/body re-conditioning and vocal system knowledge that has to be learned and it is very rewarding work indeed.

David Delaney, M.A., C.A.R.

303-449-2004

Boulder and Denver Offices

david@singingvoicetraining.com