India Pearman
Features Editor
Freshman Collette Turner shares her life and songs through her YouTube channel and Instagram.
Turner uses Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat to promote her singing. She began singing as soon as she started talking because she grew up in a musical family, Turner said. Her dad plays the piano and has written over 200 songs.
“When I work on a song, I don’t sing it,” Turner said. “There is a lot of behind the scenes work. I have to listen to it a lot and write out the lyrics in order to plan out what they mean to me.”
Turner first discovered her passion for singing when she started in a theatre program with the Youth Academy of Dramatic Arts at the age of seven. When she was nine, she began taking vocal lessons. Ever since then, she has continued vocal lessons with various coaches. She does vocal warm ups every night and has musical theatre practice at YADA for four hours every Saturday. Turner also auditioned for “The Voice” and she made it through the first two rounds of the process.
“I got a lot of awesome feedback from a lot of undercover people in Hollywood who know what they are talking about and were able to give me a lot of advice,” Turner said. “It was just a really cool experience because there were over 4,000 people auditioning and only 100 people made it [to the third round], so I was really happy.”
Turner started posting regularly on her YouTube channel two years ago, she said. Her videos consist of Turner singing both pop and musical theatre covers, but she also has other videos such as “A Very Silly Q&A,” which is a video of her answering questions asked by subscribers and a montage of her videos from the Summer of 2017. She uses iMovie to edit and a typical video will take her about 20 minutes to edit, she said. Turner wants to branch out in the types of videos that she makes and plans to produce videos about her upcoming travels and fashion trends. However, she still wants the main focus of the channel to be singing.
“Ariana Grande started posting videos on YouTube and that’s how she was discovered for ‘Victorious,’ so I thought that if someone I look up to does that it might be fun to do it too,” Turner said. “My favorite part is the positive feedback that I get from my friends, my family and other people on the internet because it is really rewarding.”
Turner also uses her Instagram to document her life, as well as a way to promote her singing on her YouTube channel. She posts pictures about twice a week of things that she likes and pictures of her friends. She describes her overall feed as being bright and having pink and purple undertones in order to encourage other people to be happy. She currently has a total of 1,071 followers on Instagram.
“My favorite part is the comments [I get on Instagram] because I love interacting with people because I am really social, so it is cool to get people’s feedback on what I have to say,” Turner said.
Turner hopes to get at least 100 Youtube subscribers by the end of the year and wants to become sponsored from offers through either her Instagram or Youtube accounts. Although she has already received offers for sponsorships, she does not feel that they represented her content fully, so she did not accept them. Turner also wants to study music in college, specifically focusing on her vocal skills and song writing.
“I want to be a singer when I am older so I am hoping that I can maybe get discovered through YouTube,” Turner said. “Singing is what I want to do.”
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