A Voice Apart

Spending over 32 years running my own professional voice/vocal business, I have been working with (estimated) over 20,000 clients on their speaking and singing voices.  Luckily, the mechanics (which are applicable for the speaking and singing voice) are exactly the same. Both my speech ( The Total Communicator Course ) and singing course begin with exactly the same speech exercises. Those exercises have a very important purpose, as they are designed to relieve the pressure of the sound from the vocal anatomy as a whole. The wholesome mechanism takes place to allow the voice to work in the fullest capacity possible with no pain or strain on the vocal anatomy. The voice, restructured to the facial muscles, begins to work in full conjunction and coordination with the abdominal muscles, which play the role of the support for the lifted sound. And the upper diaphragm muscles (rib cage) assure the width and the body of the sound. When all of the components of that wholes...

Let’s suppose you woke up feeling ill and experiencing sore throat, cough and a fever. Naturally, you think that you got a cold or caught some kind of a virus Nothing too dangerous, you may think... So, for the next several days, you do everything to get rid of the symptoms. And yes, you were able to get rid of pretty much all of them, except your throat is still bothering you. Moreover, after you knocked down your cold or your virus symptoms, you discover that, not only that your throat is still sore, but your voice is acting kind of weird . It’s sounding kind of hoarse and raspy and you have to clear your throat every 15 minutes. The time passes by and you are completely recovered on every level, but your voice is still sounding  Hoarse and not coming back to its normal state. In this instance, you decide to go back to your family doctor, just to get a referral to an ENT specialist. After waiting three to five months for that appointment, to your dismay, you find...

Approximately a month ago, I received a student from the US who has been a professional singer all his life, but for the past while, he had begun experiencing some vocal problems ; like a loss of high range, a raspy/hoarse voice and a collection of excess mucus in the throat, coupled with minor acid reflux . He was experiencing fatigue with his voice and could no longer sing for prolonged periods of time. That made my client very insecure and resulted in him refusing and cancelling upcoming gigs. He originally arrived to me, per-registered for 20 hours of non-surgical voice repair sessions, but ended up taking 30 hours to learn the new vocal technique and to lose the bad habits adopted for the last 40 years being on stage.  The voice repair was actually complete within 10 (maximum of 15) hours; the rest of the sessions were dedicated to mastering the actual singing performance . It was not easy, as I told him, jokingly, even before we started, ...

Vocal damage hurts, but you don’t have to. It could be devastating when the vocal injury occurs for both speakers and singers . Interestingly enough, for speakers, it appears to be even more tragic, as they are absolutely unaware of that occurrence. While overusing and abusing their voice, they have no idea that one day, it can burst on them. They continue pushing and pulling until their voice literally “pops” (as had been literally described by one of my voice repair clients ) and then becomes hardly usable.  Clearly, the above had not happened at that moment; The, so to speak, ‘stage’ (the precedent) had gotten pre-set for some time. Those voice-injured singers/speakers were (almost literally) ‘developing and gradually building a bomb’, and it was only a matter of time before the now-ready 'bomb’ would eventually detonate.   Given the above, needless to say, regardless, of whether they were amateur or professional speakers, they were sensing the change in ...

It is, indeed! However, like any of the human body muscles , the voice muscle has to be approached with a ‘working smart and not necessarily hard’, attitude and knowledge. If some body builder is trying to lift the weight which is above his capacity and way beyond his capability, or expertise on how to do it in such a way, so he would not end up hurt, he actually might get injured in no time and his body building career may end in a split second. Likewise, if a singer (or wannabe singer), will start working really hard on his vocal pieces and not realizing that he is excessively using , (and abusing for that matter), his vocal anatomy, he may end up with a vocal injury which pretty much could jeopardize his singing career. The majority of vocal damage could be approached and treated non-surgically ; some may require a vocal surgery.  The latter is definitely not desirable, as any surgery of any kind may do more harm than good. In my previous blogs, I descri...