How a jazz singer and voice coach uses her Mac to help students master their vocal range, in person and over Skype.

Case Study: Sandy Cressman

Occupation: Singer and voice teacher

Gear: MacBook Air loaded with iLife, MakeMusic Finale (for musical notation), CD burner, MIDI keyboard, Zoom H2 digital audio recorder, preamp

Cressman and student Demetri Skentzos warm up with scales during a lesson at her studio.

A musician who loves her Mac--what’s so groundbreaking about that? Nothing, on the surface. But Sandy Cressman, a San Francisco singer and voice coach who specializes in Brazilian jazz and travels the world to perform and teach workshops, simply couldn’t ply her art--or her trade--without her MacBook Air and a slew of other digital tools.

Going the Distance

Cressman’s voice students sign on with her to improve their technique singing rock, jazz, and pop. “Some of my younger students definitely come in with American Idol in their minds,“ she says. But beyond that, goals run the gamut, from improvement for the sheer joy of it to prepping for live or recorded performances. Cressman primarily teaches from her home studio and at workshops, but a handful of her students take virtual lessons via Skype.

Finding the right voice teacher is a lot like finding a therapist, contractor, or hair stylist. Once you click with someone, you want to do what it takes to keep working with him or her.

When a German student asked if she taught over Skype, Cressman hadn’t tried it before, but she soon saw the advantages. “I realized if we have that connection and she feels comfortable with me, then that’s an important part of her being able to progress.”

Cressman records her voice and piano playing using a pro mic and preamp, ultimately sharing MP3 files with students or collaborators on disc or via YouSendIt.

Cressman had ruled out the idea of teaching over the phone, but the popularity of voice and video over IP made it practical for her to work with students from virtually anywhere. “Pitch and voice have a lot to do with observing muscles on the outside--whether there’s extra tension or not,” she says. “There’s so much you could be missing if you can’t see the students. It wasn’t until videoconferencing became easy that I could do that.”

One drawback to the method, however, is the split-second time delay that’s unavoidable with Skype or other VOIP solutions.

“We have a body of exercise scales and chords that they’re familiar with so that I can play to them and say, ‘Sing this scale on this syllable,’ and they sing it back to me. Unfortunately, we can’t play and sing together in live time.” To alleviate this, Cressman records the entire Skype session as well as any accompanying practice tracks and sends students the audio files via YouSendIt.com.

During Skype lessons, Cressman (shown) can see her student's face, jaw, and neck and hear their voice from thousands of miles away. The VOIP time delay poses a challenge, but Cressman gets the live-action view of the student she needs to coach them successfully.

For live lessons, Cressman sends students home with a CD of the exercises they worked on, so they can practice for the next time. She and the student sing directly into her studio mic, which goes into a preamp, then to the MacBook Air, then directly to her CD burner. GarageBand is her audio editor of choice.

Garageband Trumps Pro Tools

Cressman is familiar with industry-standard music editor Pro Tools, but for her needs, GarageBand is much more useful. “For getting down arrangement ideas quickly and for composing, it’s more than adequate.”

Cressman’s Intel MacBook Air replaced a 15-inch PowerBook G4. She occasionally misses the chunkier Mac’s built-in optical drive and larger storage capacity, but says the Air is much easier for her to schlep to and fro.

Besides heavy use of GarageBand, Cressman uses iPhoto to manage her personal photo library, which includes a collection of images of Brazilian percussion instruments.

“I can’t carry all of the instruments around with me,” she says. So she shows an iPhoto slide show accompanied by Brazilian jazz “to stress that my singers understand the rhythmic groove underneath samba and bossa nova.” Photos and audio of each instrument give  workshop attendees a better understanding of how they work together in a Brazilian jazz percussion ensemble, or batucada.

Though she sometimes misses the power of her PowerBook G4, the Air's slim profile better fits Cressman's itinerant lifestyle and petite physique.

Cressman is also the lead singer in a group called Homenagem Brasileira. The group released two CDs, Homenagem Brasileira and Brasil - Sempre no Coração (Brazil, Forever in My Heart).

Cressman’s digital arsenal makes it possible for her to perform live with ensembles she doesn’t collaborate with regularly. “Jazz musicians typically have a much easier time saying, ‘OK we’re going to do a gig, play this and this, and choose from a common repertoire.’”

But when it’s Brazilian music, that’s not necessarily the case. “It’s not like I go and sing ‘Take the A Train’ or other jazz standards,” she says. The ability to get the musical notation down in Finale, record her vocals and piano backing in GarageBand, convert the tracks to MP3s, and share everything with fellow musicians as digital files via YouSendIt “makes it possible for us to do a nice concert and sound rehearsed, even though we haven’t rehearsed.”