Ariana Grande is opening up about her speaking and singing voice, and how it’s changed for the Wicked movies.
During an appearance on Good Hang With Amy Poehler, the 32-year-old eternal sunshine singer spoke about how she trained her voice to sound for taking on the role of Glinda in both movies, and how that voice changed over the course of the two movies.
Keep reading to find out more…
“I trained my voice for months before my first audition, because Glinda’s voice is so different than mine,” she explained to Amy.
“I trained with my vocal coach, Eric Vetro, and it just takes muscle memory. So for weeks and weeks and weeks, I’d go every day. I was a coach on The Voice at the time, and I was going in the mornings to Eric and then my acting coach, Nancy Banks, and we would work on random things, not even Glinda related things, just to sort of get the muscles moving.”
“I just spent every day going to retrain that falsetto operatic area of my voice because I wasn’t using it for a long time. You can hear the quality change if you look through the voice notes from way back then. The first week I went, there was so much air seeping out and then slowly but surely, week after week, there was more purity and more clarity to get higher,” Ariana added.
“Everything has to be tighter in the vocal cords…you could hear more rasp in my voice, right? So the same amount of air, but the quality became clearer and more pure as time went on,” she explained.
During the conversation, Ariana addressed how Glinda sounds, and how she trained that specific tone in order to not think about on set.
“She has a a pure tone and it’s more classical and I trained really hard so that that could not be a thought on set, so that by the time we were in it and had to move seamlessly into the songs, hopefully, that wasn’t a stress. That wasn’t a thing. No one was worried about are the notes going to come out right? And if they didn’t, it probably made sense emotionally. You know, there are moments where especially, in the second one, where we have breaks and we have like, choked up and you can hear it. And that’s kind of like the beauty of being able to do it live on set because you get to honor what’s happening in the scene,” she said.
“For Glinda, when she’s younger, it was a little bit pingier and when she’s older, it’s a little more grounded, a little more lived in. She’s like a public figure now…it has a slightly different tone. But then when she’s with Elfie again and having fun, there’s more pep,” she said.
Ariana also said she kept track of all of it with color-coded sticky tabs to bounce back and forth with the mindset shift.
“There were a lot of little tools that helped with the mindset shift…singing voice and speaking voice feeling a little different, that was a really fun thing to sort of figure out. Some of her songs in the second movie, you get to hear her open up a little more, whereas like everything in the first movie is so controlled and prim and proper and bubbly,” she noted. Watch above!
If you missed it, she just belted out “Shallow” and a bunch of other tunes on a late night TV show!
via Source
