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Showing posts from October, 2012

Vocally Speaking and Otherwise... Quality versus Cheap Bargain Deals?

I have been running the Royans professional Vocal School since February 15th of 1984.  By the way, at that time, it was called the Royans School for the Musical Performing Arts. We opened it at first as a regular Italian neighborhood music school. Outside of myself, we had 6 or 7 junior instructors and not just for vocals, but for the variety of musical instruments we taught. Almost 29 years ago now, there was a vastly different world. We had over 100 students and over 7 teachers and a huge demand for our services from both children and adult populations.  For each musical discipline, we had a certain curriculum, the certain set of hours attributed to each of them, and definitely, a set price for each and every course we were delivering. Those were the days when we had a rotary phone on our desk, and a tape answering machine. And a few years later, we even acquired a typewriter, as strange as it sounds today. My assistant, who is to date 25 years old, while writing this

Vocally Speaking - Why Fix it if it ain't Broken?

Being a vocal coach/consultant and non-surgical voice repair specialist, I fixed and restored a lot of voices in my span of 38 years of teaching. Granted, all of these singers and speakers came either with broken voices or with their ordinary voices, which I was able to bring to the new heights. I never in my practice, took a person with an already good voice and natural talent and tried to make him or her anything else, but what the God gave them originally. If it ain't broken, why fix it? However, I see several artists who were discovered on various talent shows and who were absolutely fine, until some vocal coaching took place and then, their voices became unrecognizable. Let's take a look at Susan Boyle's discovery If you compare to how she sounded while singing the famous "I Dream a Dream" song during Britian's Got Talent in 2009 and then watch her on the Oprah show where she outright choked on her own voice, and then, even after the fact, she n