A Voice Apart

Who is the Biggest Loser you may wonder…? LET’S FIND OUT! "Evidently, when it is concerning the human anatomy, there are no “cutting corners”.   A few years ago, sometime in November, my friend and I went to Niagara Falls to watch a Christmas skating show known as “Christmas On Ice”. We’ve been there all previous years and really loved that show, but I have to say, that last year’s show was the worst out of all. There were only about 10% of the original cast participants in the show (skating, dancing and singing). We were wondering then why there were young and inexperienced skaters desperately trying to resemble something remotely reminiscent of the original show? In all three categories, the performers were very amateur and clearly inexperienced. They were hardly rehearsed, the pace of the show was very fast, very loud and very chaotic. I have to say that it was also very poorly directed. In the most recent show that we watched, my friend and I were very pleased to see (for the

“What do you mean by that”, you, my reader, may ask?’ To explain better, I first will give you an example concerning figure skating, which will be very-much-so related to our topic on voice mechanics down the road. I think, by now, a lot of you know that I am a big fan of figure skating (and ballet for that matter); and in my childhood and adolescence, I was taking skating for many years and taking it very seriously. Given that, I know a lot about it, even though that I did not become a professional figure skater myself (to my dismay and biggest disappointment). I just recently (watching live and on TV, Skate Canada) witnessed some skaters literally stepping out of the “circle”. Our Canadian pair (Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford) skated fabulously; but then Meagan fell on a free skate, indeed, stepping out of the circle.  The commentator, Tracy Wilson, said (with these the exact same words) “She gets out of the circle and really came down hard”.

Over the years, I have possessed a lot of singers (or wannabe singers), and also speakers who originally came to me for non-surgicalvoice repair to restore their speaking and singing voices. Now, after certain amount of hours spent with me restoring their voices and re-learning how to really speak and/or sing , they naturally became very excited and began to practice on their own, in spite of my warnings to them to keep it in moderation.  I do understand that they are very excited to reach the new higher grounds with their speaking and singing voices, but they do not understand that the bad habits, which got them in trouble in the first place, are still there and have been there much longer then the newly – found good habits. There is a saying: “Bad habits die hard”.   Indeed!  So what happens is; once my clients start practicing on their own sooner than they were advised, the bad habits kick in and knock down the newly-instilled good habits.  So the process begi