A Voice Apart

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, that

In this blog, I would like to speak about the human voice in general and the speaking and singing voice in particular. Many people, especially those who are not singers, have no Idea that something may happen to their voice. They get the odd cold or virus, lose their voice momentarily and for a short term, but then regain it fairly quickly and go back about their lives, as per normal. Unfortunately, they do not even have a clue that, at the time of the cold or when the virus occurs, they have to be extra careful and extra gentle to their, somewhat bruised, voice. Being quite unaware of what the consequences might be, they continue as before; speak a lot, speak loud, scream and sing. Then, finally, they get rid of the cold but, to their surprise, find out that their voice never got back to normal!   It still sounds raspy, low and actually, altogether hoarse, as it does not have its usual tone or resonation for that matter. That’s when, unfortunately, the ordeal

But if it is... We are here to help rectify any voice/vocal problem and fix it Non-Surgically and Non-Invasively. ASK US HOW... Being a vocal coach/consultant and non-surgical voice repair specialist, I fixed and restored a lot of voices in my 50 years of teaching and 40 years of running my own business. Granted, all of these singers and speakers came to me either with broken voices or with their normal everyday voices, which, VIA my efforts, experience and expertise, I was able to bring to 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 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 whil

I remember watching one of my favourite movies-"Basic Instinct", with Michael Douglas and Sharron Stone in main roles. There was one of the scenes where Michael Douglas's character was making love to his girlfriend, which in real sense, resulted in the actual force, as he was already attracted to Sharron Stone's character and felt angry, because he intuitively felt that the outcome of it could be deadly for him in the end. I have a similar feeling when I am listening to a singer reciting a great song with great emotion, while actually "forcing/murdering" their vocal anatomy. The audience, who does not know any better, are saying "Oh my god, He/she is such a great singer !" while having not the slightest idea of what that singer is experiencing and what it does to his/hers vocal chords and vocal box in general. That's, in my opinion, qualifying as a "vocal rape", nevertheless. As a consequence, the singer will get a nasty gro

I have been working with beginners and professionals for over 37 years now. Strangely enough, I find that to work with the beginners is much easier than to work with people who had some vocal experience or a lot of it. The beginners do not know any better or any worse for that matter, and it is easier to put them on the "right track", as they don't have any pre-conceived ideas.  They also don't have the bad habits instilled in them either by themselves or by incompetent instructors, whereas those people with so called "experience" consciously or primarily sub-consciously are rejecting 'so to speak' the new modality of a "new behaviour", I could compare it with patients who receive new organs via medical transplant. Sometimes, the human body rejects something foreign, in spite that it could be a live saviour for the patient.  I also have older clients, and with them, there is another problem. They are very conservative, and they

We all go to sleep and wake up with the news on the radio, TV or Internet. Usually, none of the news stories are positive. They typically speak about crimes committed on a daily basis, horrible accidents that are happening all the time, and the getting-worse-by-the-minute financial situation in the country and around the world globally. Also, they are reciting about new technology, which is being upgraded literally all the time and not necessarily for the betterment of humanity. Therefore, evidently, the world is becoming more dangerous, more financially unstable, more electronically oriented and much less personal. Speaking of personal, the media and marketing campaigns are promoting complete selfishness and ‘Me, Myself and I’ attitudes. Just listen to them; “My phone, my personal TV, iPhone, iTunes,”, in other words Me, Me, Me, Me… and Myself. With this philosophy, how is the human being supposed to care for another human being when it’s all self-oriented? How’s the performer able

You are obviously familiar with the term "peripheral vision". Every driver knows that if they don't exercise their peripheral vision they might get into trouble, as when you're driving you have to watch front, back, left and right. It is that level of attention that will help you avoid an accident because you can catch an unexpected object racing at you with just the corner of your eye. Personally, I encountered that situation not too long ago... Needless to say, if it were not for my active use of peripheral vision, I would not be writing this blog now. Along a similar vein, while running a number of vocal workshops and seminars over the last close to four decades, I have learned that when conducting a large group of people, I had to mastermind a skill allowing me to be able to see all of my participants at once in order not to lose their attention while I was engaged with them on a subject. In the context of sports; For example, hockey players cannot play their ga

As it appears to be, the latest craze in the entertainment business is "everybody's favourite" Lady Gaga's act...? Is it really though? It no doubts is for the young generation. Sometimes even too young. On July 12th I was cordially invited by one of my artist's mom to attend the newest Lady Gaga tour "The Monster Ball". Let's first talk about the audience. Needless to say, there were a lot of under legal age kids, who I'm not sure should have necessarily had to hear it with their ears and see it with their eyes. The material of the show was quite explicit and definitely not for all ages. It was a lot of liberation presented by Lady Gaga on every level. You could not understand who was male and who was female in that show and who was seducing whom. She was reciting in between of her "escapades" how liberated she was, how free she was (I presume in her sexual preferences and what have you) and did invite the audience to feel free and

How “different” or perhaps weird do you have to be to make it in the music business? And why do you have to be “different” or furthermore weird to attract the attention of the general public? I don’t know if I have the answer, but I do have a few ideas and thoughts. In my opinion, people in general are bored and they are constantly looking for something that is not as mundane as their regular lives. And there is nothing necessarily bad about that, as long as it is not being taken out of proportion. Yes, we all want to watch and hear something new and unique. And that’s fine. However, especially lately those new and unique ideas are being turned into very weird and ugly acts. The music videos are becoming more and more explicit and are reminding of XXX porn more so than any music. The content of the videos outside of the porn is reminding of some type of Halloween in the absolutely worst interpretation of that word. That is one side of it. Now let’s touch on a couple of other sides. I h

If you look at the history of the music industry for the last three decades, we can notice that a lot of famous people are not with us today. A lot of them "went away" much before their time. Some of them died from drug overdoses, some of them died of AIDs, others shot themselves or committed suicide one way or another. Why is that happening you might ask? These artists seemed to have had it all - fame, success, wealth and everything else under the sun. But could they handle it? Evidentally not. The question is why. Yes, a lot of talent has been discovered by fluke and accidentally. Some of the talent was searched for and by different means: numerous contests, Canadian and American Idol competitions, Britain's Got Talent and what have you. And if you watch these aforementioned shows, you would see that it's not exactly about vocal talent. At least it wasn't always the case in recent years. It seems to be that the judges were almost looking for somebody who was, so