A Voice Apart

What do I mean by the voice "signature", you may ask? What I mean by it is that your unique sound and style should be present in your performance. Some people do not know how to connect with the sound their producing and how to own their voice. They're simply copying to the T, the original singer, while covering the well known tune, or use the same sound they like in their so called original tune. My specialty as a master vocal coach/consultant for many years, is to discover and uncover the artist's true spirit/voice. I truly believe that your voice is your spirit and it has to be flown unlimitedly off of your physical body and to the universe, so to speak. And needless to say, the sound has to be flown upon design. After all, when the spaceship is launched, the astronauts or the tower are not guessing where it's going to end up - on the moon or on Mars. They pre-count and pre-design the destination, and means how the spaceship will get there, much in ad

What do I mean by that title, you might ask? It is extremely peculiar, especially that 90% of my work nowadays is non-surgical voice repair . How do you think I acquire the clients who do require the non-surgical voice repair? My answer is,  I do have suppliers...? Take a wild guess. Who do you think I call suppliers? My "wild guess" would be - the well known vocal coaches and renowned music producers. They successfully manufacture voice problems , i.e. vocal nodules , polyps , dysphonia ...to name a few, and I, in turn, successfully attend to those problems. It seems to be the perfect equation...? For whom though? I do not complain about the lack of business on that front, but what about the artists? As we're witnessing now, every second one of them requires, never mind non-surgical, but quite evidently the surgical interference.  How sad is that? All of them have "the best team around them", or at least their management so claims. Mor

For Many Years, I am advocating non-surgical voice repair for my clients. Some of them are singers, some are not. Quite a lot of them have similar symptoms and often, similar causes of their voice loss. When we talk about those who are not singers, it is somewhat a different feel and perception from both sides, my own included. With the singers, it's usually a straight forward deal. Their career is based on the use of their voice. Before they could sing, however, not necessarily up to professional standards, (which is what caused the problem in the first place) but now they cannot sing at all. It is a tragedy to say the least, as all of their dreams are shattered and performances and tours are postponed until further notice, or even indefinitely like in John Mayer 's case. It is interesting enough that those artists are not looking for any gimmicks with respect of the means of how to fix their voices, and primarily, willing to do anything to get back on stage.

Yes, the answer is that unfortunately it does have a lot to do with the conventional vocal coaching or self-inflicted bad vocal habits. The conventional vocal coaching suggests to the artists to drop the jaw down, to stick the stomach out and to drown the voice as low and as deep as possible into one's anatomy...? Let's analyze this and examine if there are any logical grounds underneath of those methods. To my knowledge and everybody else's knowledge who at least attended Grades 6 or 7 physics and geometry classes, that the sound is a physical, material body and it travels as such. If you visualize a pitcher, would you visualize him pitching the ball downward or rather above and on top of his physical body, trying to establish a high altitude and thus, a high level of flight trajectory to achieve the aimed destination with his thrown ball? Respectively, the sound will also fly on top and above of the physical anatomy, taking the centre of the physical body for c

Let's imagine that a so called piano player, instead of playing properly the given instrument, is constantly hammering on it, instead of playing on it with both hands and using the right intensity, as expected. Please take a wild guess to what could happen next...? It is inevitable that their instrument (piano in this case) will fall to pieces. Then what? Then, the best piano technician will be employed to put together that wonderful instrument and sometimes even make it better sounding and performing than the original had ever been. And why not? Now the aforementioned piano has new strings, new PIANO hammers, and all together, new "bells and whistles". The only thing that would be needed is a good piano player who would make it sound even better and will not break that instrument in a short order again. But instead...? The player still has a "hammer" in his hand, which, unfortunately,  has never gotten to be removed in first place! And what do y

I'm religiously watching both television shows - The Voice and the American Idol . And I have to say to my pleasant surprise, both shows "raised their bar", almost to the max! The word "almost" suggests that I'm not 100% in the agreement with the judges of The Voice. However, even that proximity is pretty high. I would say, I agree with their choices at about 95% of the time. It looks like they are looking for something different, i.e. unique tone and unique delivery of the song, but they are not as much concerned about the pitch and the technical aspect of vocal performance . And I guess on those counts, I'm not 100% in agreement with them. Whereas American Idol , at least this year, is possessing incredibly good and sound performers. The female clan is almost unbelievably good. I'm afraid to say that some of them are better than the original artists. And also, to the credit of the judges, the participants are truly judged on their techni

I have to say that this 11th season of American Idol is extremely exciting to watch. The quality of the auditioners is much higher than in any previous years. The judges are much more objective and really looking out for the quality of singing more than ever before. I do agree with their choices close to 100%! For the record: Trust me, it's a very high mark in my standards. To their credit, they really did raise the bar of vocal performance quality. But for what cost though and on whose account? Unfortunately, on the account of the participants who are ultimately teenagers and young adults. I've never seen in previous shows, people literally falling off of the stage, passing out of the exhaustion and literally losing their consciousness and were not able to stand on their feet. In times I felt that I was watching some episodes of "Grey's Anatomy", "House" or in previous years, "Chicago Hope". All of those shows were dedicated to