A Voice Apart

After nearly 30 years, my business has gradually turned, almost in its entirety, to the Institute for Non-Surgical Voice Repair, which now, by osmosis, is a huge division of our original ‘The Royans Professional Vocal School’, founded in 1984. It seems like more and more people, (speakers and singers), have been experiencing mild and not-so-mild voice problems. Interestingly enough, almost every one of them, at some point in time, accessed their physicians and ENT specialists. Strangely enough, not one of them was helped to overcome their voice problems. At best, the medical professionals were able to offer some Botox treatments, especially for the Spasmodic Dysphonia sufferers and, or laser/scalpel surgical procedures. The Botox helped some patience momentarily, but then it got warn out and the symptoms of a nasty neurological disease of Spasmodic Dysphonia prevailed again.  The polyps and nodules were yanked from the doomed patients’ throats, but they too, to the patients’

The Lack of Understanding and more so, the lack of Knowledge of the above described can, most likely, facilitate the need for Non-Surgical Voice Repair... For many years now, I have been receiving students - singers, wannabe singers, public speakers, and also, clients,  who required non-surgical voice repair. They have been coming from all over the world (not to mention that sometimes I was going there myself as well) – from almost every state of the US, Europe - primarily from the UK - England, also Scotland, Germany and Belgium, and, of course, Asia – Hong Kong, Shanghai,  Thailand, India, Malaysia and Singapore, to name a few. In previous years, those people were coming to my school because they wanted to become professional singers or public speakers and they did not necessarily require any voice repair or any extensive voice work. They were just lacking the voice/vocal technique which would preserve their voices from damage and, therefore, would allow them to enter i

Lately, I have been attending to more and more voice disorders of all types and kinds. Majority of them have had similar symptoms, but, needless to say, not necessarily the similar causes. The symptoms usually consist of hoarseness, sore throat, pain while talking and/or singing, burning vocal cords (usually from excess of gastric acid, which shoots directly up the throat, especially if the voice is positioned quite low in the vocal box). Those nasty symptoms make a person quite miserable and depressed. It does interfere with their careers, even when they are not necessarily singers. They often are asked if they have a cold, or what is wrong with them or their voices in particular. Some male voices turn soprano’ish and those males often mistaken for females. It is quite disheartening for all the people who experience some kind of voice disorders, as their lives, in one way or another, have been disrupted. Strangely enough, though some of them are looking for a magic

Teaching , producing and repairing voices for almost four decades, has brought an estimated 20.000 students of all kinds under my care. Some of them were complete beginners and wanted to do it just for fun.  Others were also beginners, but had a big ambition to become professional singers, however, sometimes; they did not show a very big talent to begin with. Obviously, I work with a lot of semi-professional and professional singers as well.  But today, we will be talking about the beginners with possession of ‘not so obvious, at the glance’ talent. A lot of them have big dreams. Are they realistic? From my point of view, they very much so could be. When I start working with them, it’s a clean slate i.e., they do not have the pre-conceived ideas or very bad habits for that matter, but just willingness and lovingness to realise their dream of becoming a singer. Sometimes, I prefer that to a big, so to speak, talent, as these, so called, ‘talented people’, not n