Hello again…
My name is Francesca Bindi and I absolutely love to sing.
I have been singing ever since I can remember. In fact, in an early years nativity show, I played a small singing angel. I don’t remember very much about the show, however I remember the feeling of singing in front of an audience of parents. This became a core memory of mine, and is when realised that singing was going to be the absolute love of my life.
To be able to express myself through singing, no matter what I was going through, made dealing with my emotions a lot easier.
I began singing lessons for fun and as a chance to practice with a singing teacher. This eventually turned into more serious classes for my vocal development. I began to focus on songs appropriate to my young voice and eventually started working towards graded singing exams. Before long I moved on to more advanced styles of Musical Theatre and eventually Classical Arias, earning places in county-wide singing competitions.
As I mentioned before, I have always been fascinated with singing as a practice. In my teen years, I took part in many musical endeavours such as gigs, open mic nights, choirs and musicals, both curricular and extracurricular.
However, it wasn’t until I began studying for my BA in Music theatre that I started to become interested in the voice as an instrument and therefore interested in the more technical, nuanced side of singing. This became equally fascinating as, within university, we began to study Estille technique.
Estille Voice training, or EVT, is a technique useful for vocal coaches and speech therapists as well as singers. It helps aid already existing vocal skills by the control of specific structures within your vocal mechanism.
It is an extremely interesting method that has helped myself and countless other singers with their vocal technique development. By viewing my vocal anatomy (I.e lungs, ribs, diaphragm, larynx, tongue, vocal folds ETC), as an instrument, It made me take my singing and training a lot more seriously.
I really began to apply a lot of the techniques that were taught to me throughout my first year of University and, during my second year, I began teaching some of these techniques at a dance school in the area.
After graduating I gained experience in the performing arts industry professionally as a singer and performer. Some of my professional credits include short films, solo gigs and a 1950’s inspired rock and roll trio. I also spent time abroad performing in TIE (Theatre in Education), where we toured European schools and performed abridged versions of well known West End musicals.
In the meantime I continued to teach, starting off with just a couple of students per week doing private singing lessons. I was soon working with various performing arts schools such as “Stagecoach” and “Make Believe Group” as well as running my own singing workshops around London. I also began teaching Drama at after school clubs as well, which has really helped develop my teaching strategies even further.
I continued to study singing technique and Music Theory in my own time, exploring the more technical parts of Estille and eventually, Bell-canto techniques in more depth, to further expand my knowledge to use as both singer and teacher.
