For someone who has been doing music and theatre for most of her life, British vocal coach Maureen Scott defines her start in showbiz as terrible.
"My whole family is really musical," laughed Scott good-naturedly. "We had a family band. But it was really bad. We were babies, but it was fun."
When she was 16, Scott was signed to Walt Disney — making records and appearing on television shows. She later attended drama school, and started working in musical theatre. After 20 years of experience in theatre, she shifted her career path to become a vocal coach.
"I was bored. It was the same thing every night — singing the same lyrics over and over. I didn't want to do it anymore," said Scott.
The change in career direction led Scott to the British Voice Association, where she learned valuable tricks of the trade from ear, nose, and throat doctors, as well as different speech and language therapists. For 10 years, she worked with American voice specialist Jo Estill who developed the Estill Voice Training System.
Scott is now a certified master trainer of the Estill Voice Training system, teaching her students to develop their vocal abilities through the control of various muscles and vocal mechanisms. Some of her students include famous names like Bjork, Natasha Bedingfield, Mika and Delta Goodrem.
Aside from her celebrity students, Scott also helps aspiring singers on their path to stardom. For the past several years, she has worked as a vocal coach for some of Britain's most successful TV programme like X Factor and — most recently — The Voice.
Scott was recently in Thailand to provide a short music lesson for artists signed to the BEC-Tero entertainment company.
As a vocal coach from The Voice (UK), what would be your advice for anyone going for an audition?
Sing a song you like. Sing a song you know well. Look nice. Be polite. Listen to what you're told. Listen to what people say to you. But don't worry about the other contestants. Believe in what you sing. Believe in it because we look for potential and tone. Everything else can be taught. You need to have good instinct and good interpretative skills.
You have quite a long list of students, famous and otherwise. Who are easier to work with? The pros or amateurs?
It's different. It's not a question of easy or not easy. The only thing that's not easy is a difficult personality, but not a voice.
Is singing mainly about techniques — hitting all the high notes — or rather about conveying one's emotion?
Both. Without the technique, you can't convey the emotion. It goes together. You can't be a singer without emotion, instinct and imagination.
A singer needs to be accurate technically.
How should singers take care of their voice?
Avoid drugs and too much alcohol. Spirits, particularly, are not good. Wine, one glass, not two. Wine is okay, but not before a show. And drink lots of water.
Sometimes, singers get acid reflux. Their vocal folds get damaged because of the acid. It can get a bit burnt. So, they may have to go for a surgery, or to have some treatment. They can come to me and I can help them get closure on the vocal fold again.
What can singers do to maintain their vocal ability?
Practice. Lots of practice. You have to understand what you're doing and practice it. If you don't understand it, you can't practice it. Don't practice it wrong.
Apart from working with singers, you also work with people who have lost their voice. Tell us more about your experience.
Sometimes, it's not anybody's fault — they're born like that. People have issues, but it's my job to make sure that they can get their voice back. I once had a young girl sent to me from hospital. She was only 15. She had cancer and lost her voice after she had chemotherapy.
I taught her something call twang, which is to control one's aryepiglottic muscle. She did it and her mother arrived. She was able to say, "Hello, mummy". Everybody cried. Her mother cried. She cried. I cried. We all cried because she could speak again. She could be heard.
What would be your best experience as a vocal coach?
Getting it right with singers. For me, that's what this is all about — getting the voice right. It doesn't matter who the singers are. If they want something and they learn how to do it, I hope they'll eventually get it right from what I've been teaching them. When they leave me, they're going to go away, knowing they've got their voice together. They've understood how it feels and how it sounds. If it feels right, it's going to sound right. If their body is connected then I've done my job.
