The last 3 weeks have been horrific. A sore throat started at the beginning of my holiday, and just kept ramping up and ramping up, until I needed an anaesthetic spray just to numb the pain in order to sleep! Cue a trip to the doctors and antibiotics for a tonsillitis-like illness, and I’m finally coming out the other side.
I do not wish illness on anyone
So please know, I do not enjoy being ill and I do not wish it on anyone, whether it’s very severe or a mild cold. But the reality is, every one of us will get ill from time to time. Those of you who have worked with me for a while will know I am no exception. My voice is pretty robust, but every so often, I’ll get hit by something more severe that knocks my voice into an unusable state. From then it will take time to recover physically then rebuild the voice.
And THIS period of recovering and rebuilding is something I absolutely love to go through. That might seem a little masochistic but here are the reasons why:
1) Your tolerance for error is MUCH smaller
Many stronger and more experienced singers get away with a fair amount when they are healthy. What I mean by this is that they are doing things that would be detrimental in weaker voices, or running their voice to the edge when they sing, and it’s only their relatively good health and fortunate physical robustness that prevents them slipping into a vocal hole and struggling to get out again.
But when we get sick, we lose that edge. We lose the bandwidth that allowed us to get away with so much, and we have to rely on our muscle memory… this is supremely revealing. It shows us what we REALLY can do and can’t do. When we get sick, we’ll really expose when we’re actually forcing notes, because we just won’t be able to make it happen. But perhaps you’ll find notes you were worried you were forcing are actually fine.
You simply don’t get this window into how accurate you’re actually being until you have your tolerance/bandwidth for error taken away through ill health. When you are recovering and rebuilding your voice, this is a perfect time to cautiously go through your voice and see what works and what doesn’t.
2) Muscle memory vs Procedural habit
When you have a prolonged period of not being able to sing every day (e.g. laryngitis, tonsillitis, etc), your body doesn’t forget how to sing – that’s muscle memory – but you won’t have reminded yourself how it feels over that period – that’s sensation.
Here’s an example: my gym recently moved premises, and I found that in the new place I couldn’t lift the same weight. Why? Some of it is psychological as it was new premises, but a lot of is that my normal visual cues had gone. I no longer had “that mark” on the floor I could stare at, which let me know I was in the right position to lift the weight. I HAD to rely on muscle memory and how my body felt to lift with, and that showed me how much I was relying on procedural habit over muscle memory to get the weight off the floor correctly.
In the same way, when you are on the road to recovery and starting to rebuild your voice, it will be like coming to singing afresh. You won’t be able to go by the normal markers of sensation, because you’ve not experienced them in a while, so you’ve got to find them again in your new and healing state. You’ve got to go by muscle memory rather than procedural habit and your normal sensation cues. This really does help you improve your voice and vocal awareness enormously, rather than just flinging your voice at the notes and hoping you make them.
3) Enforced rest
The last thing I really appreciate about illness that forces me to take a break from singing, is that enforced rest. When your voice feels great everyday, it’s easy to want to sing everyday. But some time to let the voice rest over a couple of days can be of HUGE benefit. As a singer and voice coach I don’t get long periods I can take as uninterrupted vocal rest, so I try to enjoy what I can about illness forcing me to take time off using my voice.
Try and stay healthy, but know there’s a silver living
Again, I wish for you all to stay fit and healthy, but do know that from (at least) a vocal perspective, there is a silver living to your recovery that can make you better singer… if you can bring yourself to dig deeper into your voice during that recovery process.