Working with Caroline Zalog

I just had a truly novel experience as a voice teacher. Being a private voice teacher now full-time for almost 20 years, newness doesn’t come that often as I have solved almost every vocal problem a 1000 times over in the last two decades.

This new experience started when I was contacted by my close friend Coltrane Nadler who is the head of R&D at Universal Music Group. From his connections at Universal Music Group he not only works with major artists like Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato and new artist like Keshi (which I have given a vocal consult to,) He also has ties to the new Gen-Z breed of entrepreneurs which have earned that somewhat derogatory name ‘influencers.’

I had the honor these last two weeks to be hired exclusively by one of these influencers named Caroline Zalog. Caroline is a model and has leveraged her marketing degree to build and Instagram following of over 1.4 million people, a Youtube nearing 300k, and a Tiktok of 80k and climbing. She has decided that she wants to add ‘singer and performer’ to her avatar which is where I enter the story. Coltrane put us in contact a few months ago and I’ve been working with her online during the pandemic.

When we started working together she had virtually no experience in singing at all. She was starting off learning the basics of matching pitch as well as understanding the difference between her chest voice and head voice. Although she definitely had grown during our online voice lessons and shown signs of talent, it was at the pace very normal for someone taking regular weekly lessons. Once she expressed to me that she plans on shooting a video of her singing very soon and releasing it to her followers, I knew that we would need a change of pace and fast.

My concern was that she would put something out too soon and ruin her chances of leveraging her social media to build a music career. Building a music career these days has so much to do with building a following online, and she has done all of that heavy lifting. It would be a mistake for her to put something out too soon and not truly show some vocal chops as well as songwriting ability.

What I felt she needed was an intensive vocal boot camp of sorts to get her closer to the level she would need to be at to release a song to millions of people. A vocal bootcamp that had the possibility to create for her a professional sounding cover by the end of it. As I got quiet about it and opened up to how I could be most of service to her, what came to my mind was to talk with her about coming out here to New York or me coming out to LA and working intensely to see how far we could get in two weeks.

I brought up the idea in passing and she jumped on it immediately. I have never been hired exclusively by someone for a such a long period of time as their voice teacher. I knew that there would be challenges because I would have to reschedule a very tight schedule of regular clients, but my curiosity of how fast I could help her grow definitely won out. I am thankful my regular students have been cool about the temporary displacement.

I learned that there is a whole other level of growth I can achieve with a student while intensely working together in a short period of time. I learned what it takes to keep someone excited for 6-8 hours a day working on singing and singing related studies. I learned which exercises actually work to fast track someones vocal growth and which ones don’t. I also learned which coordinations are much harder to build in a short period of time and which ones are not. I truly feel I have learned as much from this experience as she has. It has changed the trajectory of my teaching strategies in more ways than I can see from here.

I knew she would walk away with a tremendous amount of vocal knowledge and an big increase in vocal coordination, I just had no idea how much. I also had no idea if we could ACTUALLY get a capture of her vocals that could potentially be used for a professional presentation.

I can say with 100% certainty that I did not expect us to get as far as we did.

Not only did she learn how to match pitch to a level we were able to get a professional sound out of her, she also found a tone quality, stylistic attributes and true expressive ability that matches her identity as the artist she is intending to become.

I am humbled and honored to say that she is walking away from this experience with not only one professional-level recording, but three!

This is just the beginning of my work with her, and I have a feeling with others like her. Caroline was an amazing student during this process, she was so open and receptive and had very little resistance to the work which helped her fast track her growth. We had an absolute blast together and I am excited to be right alongside her as she takes her career to major next level.

If you know me well, you know that I say all the time how much I love my job. I get to help people learn how to sing and find joy in it as much as I desire. And that’s how I make a living. I absolutely love my time with my regular weekly clients. I could definitely see adding on this new option to hire me for extended periods of time not only for other influencers and emerging artist but for my current weekly student roster as well. I have many students on my current roster that I would love to have intensive sessions with like I had with Caroline. It has opened my mind to what is truly possible as far as changing a voice is concerned in a short period of time, and that’s an exciting thing to learn 20 years into this thing called teaching voice. Here’s to 20 more!