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Happy Easter!

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have been trying your best not to tuck into your Easter eggs early. Normally for big holidays I just send a well wishing email to all my subscribers, but a few people had commented to me that they think chocolate is bad for your voice.

But is chocolate bad for your voice?

As in all things, the real answer is “it depends“. There are certainly worse things to eat/drink for good singing, e.g. copious amounts of alcohol, anything dry and sticky like peanut butter/porridge, or anything that might give you reflux like spicy foods/curry.

Some people will know that when they eat chocolate, they notice their voice tends to feel mucous-y and gunky. Maybe not to an extreme degree, but enough that when trying to sing the gunk seems to get in the way. Continue reading “Easter Classic: Is chocolate bad for your voice?”

In a practice session of my own this week, I was cogitating on something I had been figuring out (mentioned in point 2 below). It struck me how I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self this… no guarantee my younger self would listen, but such is the folly of youth!

As I pondered this, I realised there were also a few other nuggets I thought that if every singer could take on board now, their future voice in 10 years would be light-years ahead of where they would otherwise be.

1. Put in at least a little work every day, and you’ll be amazed where you’ll be in 10 years.

Einstein (allegedly) referred to compound interest as the 8th wonder of the world. The stock market is a great illustration of this idea, where if you put a little away every month for a few decades earning a few percent interest, you will have a ludicrous pot waiting for you at the end of it. Vocal “compound interest” is the same, and daily consistent and sustainable practice adds up.

Now I’ve always been a practice-a-holic, often doing more than the minimum. Is this always good? To some extent yes, but if we are playing the long game and seeing our voices as investments in their own right, figuring out a sustainable amount of practice day to day is the best option.

You don’t want to bite off more than you can chew (generating vocal damage or days we need to recover on), but it is important the practice “investment” gets done. The consistency is what will generate the results.

2. Force only gets you so far

I almost called this “muscle vs resonance”. MANY singers and voice coaches (including my younger self) emphasise the importance of what is happening at the vocal fold level, e.g. generate even more muscular contraction of the vocal folds to generate more power.

People assume this muscular component is the dominant factor in getting a big sound. Well, it’s certainly a foundational component, but the more developed you become as a singer, the more important resonance becomes (especially in the higher ranges).

Resonance is a lot trickier to explain to people, because it’s not a physical thing (like the vocal folds), but it’s a by-product of your vocal tract forming a particular shape that enhances what your vocal folds are kicking out. And it takes a LONG time chipping away at this to develop and curate a big sound.

My point is, generating power only has its roots in what we can do muscularly. Past a certain point we need to cultivate resonance to make what would otherwise be a tiny sound, sound much much bigger.

3. Find a vocal template

Now THIS is an advanced concept. The essence of it is as follows…

While there is no one else vocally quite like you in the world, there are always very similar sounding voices who have already figured out how your kind of instrument works. Find those singers and retrace their steps.

Couple of caveats to mention:
1) At the start, your voice and your ear will be too undeveloped to accurately assess whose instrument you are similar to. Don’t worry about it. Start somewhere and adjust as you go.
2) As your voice develops, what is an appropriate vocal template will shift. This is also normal. We are looking for someone who’s voice is mirroring what we are presently experiencing, and that is going to adjust.
3) You are not trying to MIMIC that singer, but to learn their moves (a bit like dance moves) as it’s likely your voice will find those exact moves fairly easy to assimilate.

To sum up

These things might seem remarkably simple in principle, or in the message of subtle caution, but the big results they’ve generated in my voice and client’s voices belie how simple they sound. Do take these on board and trust that they’ll pay off in the years to come.

Here’s something I think about a lot: when it comes to singers first starting out, why is it that some people seem to sound better than others off the bat?

We’ve all met singers who have never worked on their voice, not tried singing for very long, but they sound seemingly decent without any training or real work.

To be clear, hard work beats talent every time, but I’m talking about before anyone has tried to do any work on their voice – why do some people appear to sound better out of the gate?

A lot of you reading this (myself included) may well have found ourselves at the opposite end of the spectrum when we first started, despite trying our hardest to improve. Some of us may feel we started at one end and moved towards the other as time wore on.

Over the years I’ve noticed this trend, along with a few others that seem intertwined with this topic, and I’ve reached a few conclusions on this topic. While I can’t scientifically prove all of the following hypotheses, I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts on this.

1. Genetic lottery

I remember hearing a story years ago, when a number of singers went to have their voices examined with a camera down their throat. Now, there’s a particular component of the vocal tract that is heavily responsible for making the physics of singing feel much easier. The narrower this particular length of the vocal tract is, the easier transitioning from low to high is, and the more effortless it can feel to traverse one’s voice. It just makes the physics of singing MUCH easier and more efficient. The reverse is also true.

One particular singer had such a narrowness in this portion of their vocal tract that the scope could barely see past it to the larynx! This person was LUDICROUSLY advantaged physiologically, such that they found singing incredibly natural and easy from day one. So even without any training whatsoever, some singers are at a distinct advantage over others in terms of their physiological makeup… but see point 4 before you want to curse them too much. Continue reading “Why some people sound better than others?”

Last time I went over things I love about my job. Now we get to the stuff people might not know or even consider as a downside to my job… but since last week’s article, I can tell you I’ve had a LOT of verbal interest in what the difficulties are.

In truth, a lot of these are counterparts to the things I love. These are the ‘other side of the same coin’ to things I love.

1. I HAVE to get my voice firing every day, whether it wants to or not

In part 1, I said one of my favourite things is I get to spend all day making music with my voice. Well, there is a downside to this. There are times I HAVE to get my voice functional, when I’m in not in great shape to do so.

Sometimes my voice has been well-worn through weeks of teaching – one of the reasons I try to factor in vocal rest days. Other times I’ll be getting over a throat infection, suffering from reflux, had a horrendous night sleep that has caused vocal inflammation, or a late night that has disrupted sleep, etc, and I will STILL have to try and get my voice started and functional.

Sure, as a voice coach or singer you could cancel a gig/run of sessions – and sometimes that’s unavoidable – but you have to try starting it up and see what state it’s in before making that call.

Professional singers who work with me can confirm, it’s all fun and games being a singer until you’re sick and your voice is knackered. Remember, cancelling brings financial cost to you, disrupts someone else’s schedule/booking requirements, and in turn bears a reputational cost when it happens more than once.

When you just sing for fun, or for a hobby/nominal income, it isn’t anywhere near as egregious to abandon a practice session or reschedule an infrequent gig. If you do decide to go ahead and sing when your voice isn’t in great shape, you can get away with not sounding your best and you can spend days recovering from blowing out your voice afterwards – I cannot take that liberty. Continue reading “Things I love and hate about my job – part 2”

When I meet new people and they ask what I do for a living, they are naturally curious about what my job entails. Beyond the sheer novelty of meeting someone who does something unusual, I think a lot of people who perhaps feel ensnared by their working schedule (as we all do sometimes) often wonder what it must be like working in a different field altogether.

I have things I absolutely love, and some things I strongly dislike, and maybe even hate at points. So across the next two articles I’ll be covering things I love and things I hate about my job. To kick things off, here are four things I truly love about my day to day.

1. I get to spend all day every day making music

If you’re reading this, you likely love music, and especially singing. There’s no denying this is a massive perk of the job. I love that every day I am able to get up, and start the day off with working on my voice and working through songs. To some extent, I’m essentially paid to figure out the inner workings of songs and how to get different voices work across different songs. I HAVE to immerse my songs every day to do my job.

In the morning, I have to do certain warm-up exercises that get my voice co-ordinated. 80-90% of the time these are straight-forward and go to plan, but there are days that the voice is less co-operative. But by and large, it’s much like a sports-person being able to get up and do their favourite physical exercises to get their body moving. Either way, I’m paid to get my voice working perfectly/near as darn it every single day, and to use it with every client across the day.

It really is a joyous thing to be able to spend some time with something you’ve built, and not only get it working right for that day, but build it further in the process. And then we come to the next thing I love… Continue reading “Things I love and hate about my job – part 1”

Last time we looked at rock singers who, even post- 70 years old, and still rocking as hard as they did back in the day.

This week, I thought it would be worth showing some singers that maybe aren’t faring so well with age.

DISCLAIMER:

We are all human, and all prone to mistakes. Every singer singing live knows there are better gigs than others, and voices can do better some days and worse on other days. The primary reason for sharing these live clips (and all of them are live) are to show just how unforgiving age can be if your technique isn’t good enough.

As we age, things change with our voice. With a well-trained voice we should peak in late 40s/early 50s… but the very same physiological changes that enable that peak in trained voices, are the very things that can derail voices without the right training. Even with voices doing 90% of things right, that 10% wrong can still be too much to keep delivering a high demand style of singing, like rock.

Therefore, the purpose of the following videos is to help those of you reading and listening to appreciate just how tough it is to keep delivering these high-demand songs into later years. It’s entirely doable (per my earlier article), but it’s important to note that even incredible voices can get derailed.

That said, brace yourselves

Whew! OK, now that the disclaimer is over, you may want to prepare yourselves to hear some less than stellar performances below. Continue reading “Rock singers who have lost it (perhaps)”