A Voice Apart

My Husband and I attended yesterday (October the 4 th ) Legends in Concert in Niagara Falls and really enjoyed it and loved it.  It was very well staged; in general, the performers were very look-alike to the original artists and also sounded quite close to the original acts. The absolute best, in my professional and personal opinion, was Tina Turner’s look-alike and actually, in my professional opinion, she was sounding better then the original Tina Turner.  As a Master Vocal Coach and Voice Repair Specialist with over 40 years of experience; teaching, consulting and repairing voices, I should say, that even I, could not improve anything in that act, singing or otherwise. Way to go Cookie Watkins ! As for the person that I could have truly professionally helped, especially with the high range and a better pitch, would be the Roy Orbison impersonator, Brian McCullough . In my professional opinion, his voice was quite low positioned while singing, and...

 Set your Destination!  “Drive” to it. Arrive and save your route in memory for future reference! What do you mean by “Vocal GPS”, you, my reader, may ask? What I mean is that, first and foremost, you have to establish a frame of reference of how to make your voice work upon design and inner-command.  Recently, I received a singing client who happened to be very talented and even possesses absolute pitch, (perfect pitch). Being a musician since an early age, playing a few different instruments, it was an absolute pleasure to start a Private Master Vocal Coaching Session with him. However and evidently, his singing and, for that mater, speaking voice , does require a lot of work. Being in his late 30’s, he adapted a lot of bad habits on his own and with “help” of his previous teachers. I told him that if I had compared his singing to a puzzle, then his puzzle would consist of a head of a cat, body of a snake and the tale of a dog (of course...

Nowadays, my practice consists of at least 85-90% of nonsurgical voice repair clients. It is unfortunate, but it is a fact. One of the reasons is that people, overall, are getting to be not as healthy as they used to be. Our earth is deeply polluted and respectively, the food we eat and the air we breathe is also very toxic. A lot of voice disorder cases I am receiving are being effected environmentally, and then of course, a lot of them have been misusing their voices while speaking and, or, singing. But, first and foremost, the problem with the majority of cases begins with their inner health inadequacy. Also, a lot of those people are very intense, loud and extremely emotional. Right away, speaking loudly and forcefully, they are putting their vocal chords, and the whole vocal box in general, in great distress. They are straining their vocal chords and twisting their larynx on a consistent, everyday basis. Their posture is usually not intact a...

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...