A Voice Apart

“We offer 'Cadillac' quality of voice/vocal coaching and voice repair.   Our services are classy, timely, high-end & simply unprecedented.” What exactly do we mean by the above statement? The Royans Professional Vocal School, aka, The Royans School for the Musical Performing Arts, was founded on February the 15th, 1984. Originally, it was designed to be a local music and vocal school. But in 1987, after the partner of the school passed away, the school took a different turn. Since I have always been specializing and highly educated in voice, I decided to turn The Royans School for the Musical Performing Arts into a professional vocal school; and thus discontinued offering any lessons pertaining to musical instruments. So now, my institution became a ‘vocal boutique’ specializing in voice and voice only. Those years, people were able to appreciate the quality and were able to make the differentiation between the “Walmart” or “Honest Ed’s” (Discounted...

Has Your Voice Been Compromised Due To The Above? You had a stroke… and luckily, you survived! In a lot of cases, after the stroke occurs, either the right side or the left side of the body ends up to be paralyzed.  Also, in a lot of cases, the speech centre is also greatly effected, and thus the survived-patient’s speech is very much so compromised. In some cases, it is still recoverable, but in others, unfortunately, the speech remains to be permanently impaired.  For those cases where I could use an alternative approach to voice mechanics , the recovery is still going to be a slow and tedious process, which will require a lot of patience from the person in question and myself.  Usually, a stroke survivor has a very slow and quite slurred speech, not to mention usually pretty faint. Obviously, there is not much enunciation, pronunciation or articulation is precent in those cases. So in order to enhance the above, a lot of special speech exercises hav...

Had Your Voice Been Compromised Due To The Above? Unfortunately, after being diagnosed with such a nasty disease like throat cancer and then, as a consequence, having to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments, the voice could be very easily compromised and the vocal anatomy could also end up damaged.  The medical doctors, in this case, are usually trying to convince their patients to be grateful that they survived (never mind their damaged voice or anything else which ended up being damaged for that matter).   They usually say: “ Be grateful that you are alive and don’t worry about your voice ”. It’s easy for them to say, but the person who use to speak (or even sing) with a normal voice, feels quite inadequate, as he/she has a communication breakdown via a raspy/hoarse voice , or sometimes, even no voice at all. Nevertheless, that person is affected with everyday life challenges, not to mention work challenges and… even the loss of the la...

Over the years, I have been attending to many clients with voice problems who had undergone speech therapies of one kind or another. Unfortunately for them, they have not gotten anything out of it and some of them actually got worse. Needless to say that, at best, they left the speech therapy office feeling exactly the same as quite a few speech sessions ago and “quite a few” dollars spent. They were especially doomed if they came to speech therapy to fix their singing voice. The fact is that those speech therapists are not trained in vocals, thus they could not be knowledgeable in the restoration of voice mechanics . Some of the singers who have , so to speak, lost their ability to sing for whatever reason, actually have their speaking voice intact or close to normal. When they come to speech therapy, they are asked to blow into a kazoo or blow a bubble into the water. They are also asked to “moo and hum” some strange sounds, which really have nothing to do...

In the conventional sense, it seems not so difficult to learn how to sing. People do some scales, some lip-trills, as well as: -      Goo-goo gaga, ney-ney-ney, meow-meow-meow (to make the cats jealous lol), miam-miam, ziam-ziam and niam-niam-niam, vocal exercises . After doing the above for years, the potential singers are assured that sometime, (perhaps, in the year 2050. lol), or soon thereafter, they will suddenly wake up with a “big voice” and that will assure their singing career for more years ahead, (if, by that time, they will have any years of their actual lives left).  Perhaps due to their age then, they could be good for a senior citizens choir or, for that matter; they can even become the worst Opera Singer, ( as seen in this video ). Who knows? Meanwhile, jokes aside, the time is passing by; the person gets older and still cannot apply any of the above aforementioned exercises to the real singing. So what’s wrong with that...

"Italy's Singing Nun Channels Madonna, Releases 'Like a Virgin' Cover" As I mentioned before, providing vocal services of all sorts for over four decades, I think I’ve seen it all and pretty much dealt with it all. However, the title (which speaks for itself) is even for me, still remains to be quite outrageous.  First of all, you my reader, may ask: 'What I mean by vocal “virginity”'?  To answer that question with more clarity, I will give you an example of a dancer who desperately wants to perform on stage, but has, so to speak, bad feet (flat feet with no arch), and also very tight hips, whereby the perfect turn out of the dancer’s body is very hard to achieve.  The above two components are crucial to the dance profession, even on an amateur or semi-professional level, let alone on a professional level. Similarly, I am receiving potential students with, at the glance, a very small mouth opening, very tight throats and quite dispropo...