About

I'm Meredith Colby.
Innovator, Musician, Author, Obsessive Learner, & Creative Dissenter

I've used my smarts, along with curiosity and my life journey to create something new. It's something that solves problems - problems of university-trained voice teachers, self-trained vocal coaches, and the singers who employ those folks.

My magical unicorn power is the ability to take a dense and complex topic and make it accessible and applicable. I've done that with neuroscience + voice training.

It's called NeuroVocal Method.

My Story

Four years of classical lessons in high school. Not because I loved classical music. I’d never heard a classical singer. I loved R&B, punk, and singer/songwriters.

Then a year abroad tending bar and singing in pubs. Then five more years of classical voice lessons at university.

I thought I was doing the right thing. I followed instructions, met expectations, checked the boxes. I didn't realize, of course, that I was cementing a motor memory for a kind of singing I didn't want and couldn't use.

When I left the University of Miami I couldn't sing the kind of music that had been my dream to perform. I sounded wrong. But I was able to join a road band, where I sang five or six nights a week for nine months. And trashed my voice.

After a year of therapy and healing, I moved to Chicago. A friend introduced me to a vocal coach who was a studio singer and concert performer. He lived in the same world that I did, and taught me how to sing for that world.

It was the first time in my life I felt like I was actually singing.

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I wanted to help other singers (also quit my day job) so I took graduate-level how-to-teach-voice at Northern Illinois University and set out to save all the microphone singers!

For the next 20 years I was a freelance singer in Chicago. I coached band singers and music theater singers during the week and sang with bands on the weekends. I headlined at most of the jazz clubs in that jazz town, sang on cruise ships, and with society bands. I headed up The Center For Voice in Chicago, directed choirs, and was a church music director. I recorded a CD of original jazz tunes. I did a lot of different gigs for music, money, and both.

I was also becoming a neuroscience nerd; reading and learning more and more about the exciting and rapidly changing field of neuroscience.

When I retired from regular gigging and focused on coaching (and on being a mom), I dug deeper into learning the connections between neuroscience and singing. I'd learn a thing, suppose how it might work with a singer's brain, and try it out on my clients.

I had been unwittingly using these same principles for years in my coaching. I was determined to support my singing clients in the music they loved. Neuroscience seemed like the best way to get there. I was connecting some dots and getting excited about it.

If you want to know about how NVM came about, you can read the story on the About NVM page. I wrote Money Notes: How to Sing High, Loud, Healthy, and Forever in 2016. It’s about NeuroVocal Method, and about microphone singing.

I’ve been there. The world of college and classical, the pain of vocal damage and recovery, and the journey of re-training a voice. I've paid my rent with my singing and logged my 10,000 hours.

I also love being a science nerd, working wth brains, sharing what I learn through presentations and content creation, and coaching singers. It's a great job.

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BULLET POINT BIO

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Author of Money Notes: How to Sing High, Loud, Healthy, and Forever
Creator of NeuroVocal Method for popular styles; an approach to singing based on brain science.
30+ years teaching experience.
25+ years performing experience
Specializes in CCM/Popular, Pop/Rock, contemporary styles, microphone-based genres, call-it-what-you-will
Bachelor of Music in Studio Music & Jazz - Vocal from University of Miami (Coral Gables)
Post-grad vocal pedagogy at Northeastern Illinois University
Certified by the Neuroscience Academy, Melbourne, AU
Experience as ED of Music Ed. non-profit, music director, choir director, ECE arts program director

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WHAT PEOPLE SAY

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We had a huge crowd, and I hit that high note, and they just stopped! It felt so good, and I know it sounded good. I'm tellin' ya, I can sing whatever I want, as long as I want, and then do it again the next night! It's just so great. I couldn't be doing this without you. Thank you, Meredith. Thank you.