Danger Signs

This post I want to focus on the dangers of forcing our voices to sound a certain way. As I have mentioned before, it is common for vocal instructors to have a preconceived notion of how your voice should sound and they teach you to crunch your voice to accommodate that sound. Some of the common things they ask you to do are:

•    Sing from the diaphragm! If you don't have rock-hard abs, you're not doing it right!
•    Have breath support: Hold back how much air you're pushing out in a phrase!
•    Take a really big breath for a big phrase
•    Sing like you're yawning.
•    You have to have vibrato.
•    Hold your cheekbones high, and keep your mouth round

   Do these things sound familiar? These tips are very common in vocal lessons. Unfortunately most of these techniques can harm your voice.
 
Enter Pamela's sob story:
  
   I took voice lessons from when I was a very young teenager. I had an incredible 4 1/2 octave range. Singing just came easily. All my teachers were amazed with my natural talent (end bragging session).
   Then my teachers decided to take all that raw talent and harness it into a beautiful operatic voice. I could sing louder than someone singing into a microphone, and typically my choir teachers had to ask me to "tone it down" so that you could hear the rest of the choir. I had a six-pack from singing.
   Doesn't that just sound painful?! It was. I almost always had pain on high notes, and my voice got very tired after singing for about a half hour. But I sure sounded awesome! My teachers bragged that I had a world-class voice.
   But I was doing damage to my voice every time I sang. One morning when I was almost 19, I woke up and I had no voice. In fact if I tried to sing higher than a middle G, my voice split apart and would sing two dissonant tones at the same time. It was incredible painful to sing anything.
   This state lasted a couple years, until I realized I had to learn everything all over; that everything I had learned was wrong. Instead of tightening everything up to sing, I had to learn how to relax.  I spent a year lying on the floor singing to encourage me to find that relaxation. To make a long story short, I lost my six-pack (rats!) and started broadening my range again.
   I eventually (almost 10 years later!) found the Bristow method. It agreed with my own findings of relaxing, and added the anatomy knowledge to support it. I haven't got back my original range, but it no longer hurts to sing, and I find that things that used to be really difficult for me, are not as difficult as I thought.

Moral of the story: A lot of methods out there are wrong. It's not the voice teachers' fault: they're just teaching what they were taught! If you're having throat pain while singing: stop! Don't stop singing, never stop singing--just let your throat relax and not work so hard. Even if you have to sacrifice some of the sound or power. It's not worth it, and as you continue to learn how to sing in healthy ways, your voice will actually become more beautiful and powerful because you're doing what your vocal cords were meant to do.