Erin Carney
Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University
Senior Voice Instructor
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Erin welcomes everyone who comes into her studio. She loves teaching students of all experience levels, from transgender clients looking for their authentic voice, to retirees wanting to try voice lessons for the first time, to music theatre professionals looking to nail their next audition. Erin uses a combination of encouragement, analysis and humor to help guide her students in the right direction.
Erin has taught at five Chicago-area music institutions, led vocal workshops, and directed small vocal ensembles. She's also a professional singer and actor. Since graduating from Northwestern in 2014, she has appeared in choirs, musicals, operas, plays and films across Chicago and the Midwest. Check out her YouTube channel for more. When did you start singing? I don’t remember this, but apparently when I was only a year old, my parents and I were visiting my aunt in Rhode Island. I got a hold of a spoon and was near the radiator. Then I started hitting the radiator and humming along to the pitch it made! If only YouTube had been around back then… |
Why do you teach?
Because it’s fun! There are some engineers in my family, so I think work that takes a lot of tweaking and finesse is in my blood. But more importantly, I love seeing students grow and become more confident and comfortable with their voices. What is your favorite teaching tool? I make my singing students play hopscotch to learn scales and intervals. Did you know scales are structured like hopscotch, where some notes are easier to land on than others? Well, you do now! How do you describe your lessons? Because your voice is *literally* inside of you, I rely heavily on body awareness and good breathing. We start with physical alignment and breathing exercises to build a solid foundation for the rest of the lesson. Then we’ll warm up your voice to get it going (like a car in Chicago winter, as a student brilliantly said to me). After that we’ll apply what we've learned to a song (for singers), or real-world sentences and conversations (for trans voice folks). My lessons are filled with humor, strange sounds, and lots of analogies. I’ll make you work too, but at the end of the day we can make that work pay off together. |
