Live Q&A with Matt Edwards

I'm with me. I have Dr. Matthew Edwards. Matt, thanks for tuning in. Joining with us. Absolutely, happy to be here. Awesome. So, it's Thursday afternoon. We're rolling through some of the top questions that we get, um, from students that are looking for teachers and students that are out there searching for how to improve their singing and their voices. So, we're going to jump on and we're going to start with, um, you know, an oldie but goody question we get a lot. And I know we have some answers on this, uh, before. But first question we have, uh, comes from Kurt. How do you warm up your voice? So, let's just kind of go over some of the good, basic, traditional answers for this one.

Great. So, um, the first thing you want to do is stretch the instrument, right? So, we think about, you know, warming up the voice itself, but you need to warm up your body. And so, first thing I would just say is, take yourself through any set of stretches that make you feel good. So, if you used to play sports and you had certain stretch routines that you did for sports, do those. If you do yoga and you have, uh, you know, some stretches that you feel like really help release any muscles that might be constricting your abdominal wall, or your chest, or your back, or your neck, do those as well. Um, you know, stretching across, getting your arms across your body, right? To help open up the muscles in the back because there's muscle actually run from your bones back here all the way up to your chin. So, we want to, or to your hyoid bone. So, we want to stretch those out as well. Uh, it's a good thing to stretch your neck to the left and to the right, looking up, looking down. Trying to hold every stretch for at least 15 seconds. That's the minimum amount of time you need to hold a stretch in order for it to be effective. And ideally, you would hold it up to 30 seconds. But after 30 seconds, you do not get any increased payoff, right? So, that sweet spot, that Goldilocks zone, is in that 15 to 30 second range.

So, after you've done that, the first thing you just want to do is get your voice moving and kind of feel what it's doing that day. And so, the easiest thing to do is just hum. So, starting with a simple like, and take it up and up your range until it starts to feel like it's a little tight, and bring it back down. And kind of work your way in that range as well. Now, if you, uh, like warming up with straws, this is a great place to use straws to sing through. If you haven't looked that up before, look up straw phonation on YouTube. You'll find plenty of videos. The guy who came up with them, uh, these exercises, made them famous as Dr. Ingo Titze. It's T-I-T-Z-E. So, you look up his videos and he explains why those exercises work. If you don't have a straw, but you want to get straw benefits, humming gets you in the zone. But you can increase the effectiveness of the hum by moving it towards a blowfish. So, in a blowfish, you take that same hum idea, but you really make sure that you're moving air against the resistance of your finger positions against your lips, and you let your cheeks blow open, which usually helps relax your throat open as well. So, this variation is just taking nice and easy up and down throughout your range.

So, what that does is it starts with literally changing the temperature of the tissues within your vocal tract. And the vocal folds themselves have a mucus membrane. And I liken it to Jell-O. You know, if you've ever made Jell-O, when I was a kid, we made it the old-fashioned way on the stove. You warmed up, uh, water, you threw in the gelatin, and then you started putting it in the refrigerator to try to get it to set. Now, when it was still a little warm, but it was starting to set, it was real bouncy. But the colder it got, the stiffer it got, and the less bounce there was. So, think of your vocal folds as having Jell-O-like properties. And you want to be careful not to be singing in that stiff Jell-O phase, but rather in the bouncy Jell-O phase, right? And we do that by warming up and making sure that we're staying hydrated.

So, after you've done some of these warm-ups, you're starting to feel like things are moving a little bit easier, you probably want to do some articulator stretches. And so, one of my favorites is to then move to a tongue-out hum. And in a tongue-out hum, you're just sticking your tongue between your lips. You're thinking of it being as wide as possible, covering the molars. You don't want it narrowing in on you. And then you just hum in that position. And what that's doing is it's teaching your body to let go of the muscles in the back of the tongue and try to pull it backwards. And it reminds your body the tongue is supposed to feel like it's neutral to slightly forward for most styles of singing, right? If you sing a style of indie pop where tongue tension is part of your sound, or a country music where it's part of your sound, this exercise may not work for you, or you may not want to take it to its extreme. But this is what it would sound like.

Just keeping it simple, keeping it easy, move it up and down. Then what I like to do. So far, I've been showing you in this like speech-like modal voice. Uh, that's where I start a lot of people off, just on this initial, let's just get your voice moving for the day. Because if we haven't moved it at all, we don't, uh, want to just jump into extreme stretching. But after we've gotten it moving, we've gotten that tongue out of the way, we probably do want to jump up into the uppermost part of your range. And the reason we do this is there is actually a ligament that runs through the vocal folds. And you can see it represented in white right there in this model. So, if you haven't seen this model before, this is the thyroid cartilage. This is where the Adam's apple, Eve's apple is in the front. And the vocal folds extend from that bump back to these two guys that are called arytenoids. And when you're trying to stretch your voice, what you're trying to do is get these guys to elongate by engaging a muscle that's called the cricothyroid muscle. And we engage that muscle by taking our vocal folds higher in pitch. And when we do that, we stretch out that vocal fold muscle and the ligament that runs through it.

That's right. So, the, the cricothyroid, we also call the stretcher, right? So, yes, literally just stretching along the cords. Absolutely. And so, you want to do this in falsetto for men, head voice for women. I call it head voice in both male and female voices. I like to use gender-neutral terms. So, I tend to use just "head" in general for any gender singer that's got that quality to their voice. And "chest" for, uh, any singer that has some "ah" in their voice. Then everything else is variations of mix. So, in my voice, getting into the stretchy head, right? Because I'm not trying to go to my extreme, I'm just trying to stretch. It's going to be around this pitch. And I'm going to do it really, really slow. It's going to be something like this.

Just slow and easy, just stretch it out. You'll move that by half steps down, and then back up, until it starts to feel like it's lightening up, it's loosening up, and it's getting easier to move into the upper part of your pitch range. So, you do that. Then, after you've gotten some of those things together, the, yes, you, you use the, the "ah" vowel, sometimes I use the full vowel, yeah, the different ones. You know, which one do you think might be better or why?

Great question. What you should do is use whatever vowel feels best to you. So, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, right? "Ah" floods out a lot of air, and so it's easy for people to get that breathy sound. But "ah" sometimes has a lot of tongue retraction in it. And if you go to an "oo" vowel, as you mentioned, that can help get rid of that. The key with an "oo" vowel is you have to remember that it's a lip vowel. And "ah" is more of a mouth-opening vowel, and things that happen with the tongue. But "oo" can't be formed properly unless you bring those lips forward. So, you got to get your lips moving in that direction. Because if you try to sing just in the inside of your mouth, it'll get tight. Versus, which gets everything to open up, right? And it's a little complicated, but essentially, if you don't set your vocal tract up in the right shape for whatever vowel that you're singing, your body will compensate. And most of the time, it's going to try to compensate in the back of the tongue, which muddies up your sound and makes it hard to sing. So, that's why on that "oo," we want to make sure to use those lips. "Ee" is a good, you know, fine. If you feel like your tongue is trying to pull back, because "ee" lifts up in the air, you know. So, pick your favorite vowel. It should be free, right?

So, you know, after you've gotten, uh, the bottom just kind of warmed up and going, and you've gotten your head voice moving, what I'm gonna do is just do some simple, uh, little tongue twisters to get everything moving around. So, I like, uh, to do "diddle daddle deedle daddle doe." And it's, uh, starts slow until you get the hang of it. It's diddle.

Eventually, we want it to pick up in speed. So, it's a real, like, uh, articulation drill. Diddle daddle deedle daddy.

So, you're just moving around with something that gets everything bouncing. Uh, sometimes I'll do just single pitches. I do "boombachika" to get things moving quickly. It's all 16th notes. I'm doing a minor key. Make it fun.

For me.

So, for most people, kind of doing those two, any other favorite tongue twisters you have, will be enough to get things moving. If you feel like your tongue is really tight, you're going to want to go into "Home Alone" position. "Home Alone" position helps isolate your jaw because a lot of times the tongue tightness is happening because you're, this muscle, this masseter muscle, is trying to engage every time that you move your mouth. It's this guy right here. All right? It starts up here at your cheekbone, it goes down to your lower jaw. And when it contracts, it helps bite down. And that muscle will start to try to bite when we're doing some of those tongue articulation exercises. So, if that's happening, you can massage it a little bit. You can massage this muscle up here because this muscle, the temporalis muscle, it also connects down here and helps us close our jaw. So, we can massage both of those out. Then you go into "Home Alone" face, where you just drop your jaw. And then you're going to use the, keep the tip of your tongue behind your bottom teeth, and just arch the tongue up to do "ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya." And we want that tongue just to be free.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, bounce in any kind of pitch pattern that you want. Uh, you're teaching your brain that the tongue works in isolation of the jaw and mouth, which is critical to getting rid of tension for many singers. So, you do those speech-like phrases and get things moving along. And at that point, you still should start feeling pretty warm. Then the next step of a warm-up is to think about any technical goals that you have that you've been working on. So, if you've been working, you know, with a coach or a teacher, or a study at home online course, and let's say, you know, that you've been working on adding a little bit of nasality into your upper notes to get through your mix using a French nasal "oo," well, then take that exercise, since that's something you're working on, and vocalize in it before you start singing your songs to make sure that you're reminding your body at the technical goal. Let's say you've been told your voice is too nasal, and you're working on warming it up, so you do some extreme "oo" vowels before singing your songs. You're doing those extreme "oos" to stretch everything out before you jump into the rep. Right? So, the warm-up really starts with stretching things out, getting things moving around, getting the temperature to change inside your voice, then reminding yourself of any of the technical things you've been working on before you jump in to start working on, uh, your songs or doing your gig.

Now, there are all kinds of variations to this, uh, warm-up routine that I gave you today. I've given one in the past. The last time we talked, I think I gave you one based off of Dr. Ingo Titze's work. Uh, there are plenty of other ones that include, you know, more body movement things that are a part of it, self-massage, both neck massage, facial massage, laryngeal massage. So, you know, look around at all of the things that you can find out there and grab on to what helps you best. What's key is if you can start learning how your voice works and what the different parts are that are moving when you're singing, you can find any exercise on the internet and then start to be able to dissect it and go, "Oh, well, in that exercise, they were telling people to do lip trills by going to warm up." That seems a lot like humming and like a finger blowing. You'd be correct. So, those all fall into the same idea of those semi-vocal tract exercises. So, you can easily substitute those raspberries, uh, over there for any of the other things I showed you at the beginning of this, right? And, uh, you know, you'll start just looking at exercises completely differently, and you'll be constantly tweaking your warm-up routine to meet your needs and the kind of music that you're working on.

Fantastic. That actually, if you guys compare that answer to some of the other ones, that just gives you a whole another lens and angle to think about the world. So, Matt, thanks for sharing so many different thoughts on that question because I feel like we've answered that question now at least three, maybe four times. So, it's always good. Yeah, I want to know. I'm happy to bring. We'll talk about it again. Awesome. Good. Was it, uh, Kurt? Hopefully that helped you out. The next one we're going to jump into, um, is, okay, moving along. How do I know if I'm forcing my voice and how do I fix it? This comes from Rachel. So, I guess, what are some signs? What are the feeling sensations? Or what, you know, how do we know? Can you know?

We can divide the vocal instrument. So, you have the structure of the instrument, and the structure is your spine, which aligns everything. And there are things that you could be doing in your posture that can end up causing like a ricochet effect of tension that comes all the way up into your throat. In fact, one time I did a workshop with a physical therapist, and they were looking at ankle problems, and the way that people's ankles would roll in, and then they would measure the shoulders and how the shoulders were positioned. Then they would tape their arches up on their foot or realign and tape their ankle, then stand them back up, compared to the old markings and redraw it. And it was unreal. The difference is that simply taping somebody's arch up would make their ankle line up, and you would see the rest of their posture change and fall in, right? So, from head to toe, your posture can have an impact on your instrument. So, you know, if you think you feel really stiff in your body, if you feel like you're limited in your movement, that might be part of what's leading you to force with your voice. If it's not that, sometimes it's your respiratory system. That's the power source of your instrument. And your power source sometimes overpowers it, right? It's kind of like if I tried to put a Porsche engine inside of a Prius. Probably not the best idea. Prius is probably gonna fall apart from that. They're gonna break on that one. Yeah, right. So, but sometimes what I see singers do is they breathe into 100% when the phrase they were singing only needed 40%. Yeah. So, like, they're putting the biggest thing they can fit in, you know, to the back of the car to try to drive this little thing. So, we might want to take away some of the breath pressure, take away some of the volume of air inside of your lungs to see if that's leading to some of the forcing. Otherwise, we're going to start looking into the instrument at what's called the source, and then the filter.

So, let's talk about this. Every instrument has a power source. So, like I said, it's the respiratory system. A vibrating mechanism, uh, so like on a guitar, on my guitars, the strings are the vibrating mechanisms. Then it has a resonator. And so, like, I have an acoustic guitar over there, and the resonator is that body on the acoustic. Whereas if you see the electric guitar behind it, it's got a really narrow body, so it doesn't have much of a resonator. That's why when you play an electric guitar, you can barely hear it unless it's plugged in. So, our resonator, and the voice is everything that travels from the vocal folds to the opening of the lips. So, power source, resonator, right? Or sorry, power source is lungs, vibrator, resonator. And then the lips and the tongue work is what are called the articulators. And the articulators are what help us pronounce vowels and consonants. And so, there's two points of view on what could be causing you to force. There's the point of view that imbalances at the vocal fold level, meaning registration. If your registration is off, it can cause everything else to compensate and give you feelings of squeezing in your throat. The other point of view is that a lack of agility in your vocal tract or a lack of coordination in your vocal tract can lead you to try to produce vowels in a way that's not necessarily the most ideal positioning of your jaw on your tongue. And you end up creating constrictions here that cause a ricochet effect of pressure to back up as it's trying to get out of your vocal folds, right? So, we could look at it as being a problem that's up here, or being a problem that's up here.

So, let's address those two things. If it's a problem at the vocal fold level, you're probably feeling more of a grunt sensation. So, I want everybody to put their fingers on the sides of the larynx. And the first thing I want you to do is breathe in, and then just exhale. Go. That's what it feels like when your vocal folds are fully open. Now, I want you to breathe in and hold your breath. That's what it feels like when your vocal folds are fully closed. Now, we're going to go back to breathing in, and we're going to sing real breathy.

That's what we would call head register. And in head register, your vocal folds are barely touching. They're on their thin upper edge, right? They're most closely, a head register is most closely related to exhaling. So, remember exhaling and thin. Then on the holding your breath, go back to holding your breath. Breathe in. Now, I want you to sing through that. Hell. Please. Good. That's called pressed. And when you're in pressed phonation, your vocal folds are really thick together, and they're pushing together really firmly. So, air barely can come through. We will use in pop music that breathy sound, but we should rarely use that pressed sound. It should only be used like one percent of the time in a song where you're like, "I want to kick that note a little bit," but you don't want to sing in that spot the whole time, right? Because that's what ends up making you feel like you're forcing is when you start leaning in that registration area towards that held breath position instead of that exhale position.

Now, in the middle, there are all kinds of variations of sound. And we call those variations of mix. And we call them mix because we're essentially mixing together some of the breathy qualities from an exhale and some of the buzzy qualities that happen in that pressed phonation. But instead of living in the extremes, in mix, we live in the Goldilocks zone, right? If you don't know that story, look at Goldilocks and the Three Bears. She had to find the porridge that was just right, not too hot, not too cold. So, we want to be in that just right zone. And most singers that are feeling like they're forcing are leaning towards the pressed side of that zone. So, in order to test if this is you, we want to see if you have control over your ability to alter your registration on any given pitch. And to do that, what we're going to do is we're going to do a swell where we start off breathy, we go to full voice, and then we come back to breathy. Should sound something like this.

All right. Then you should be able to do the opposite and go from full to breathy to full.

All right. If you can't do that, then you're going to want to try to get with somebody who can show you how to do those exercises and get you to start playing about it. I talk a little bit about in my course how the voice works. We'll pop up the link at the end. But in there, I walk through with a male and a female singer doing these exercises. At first, they're going to be a little bit difficult to do because when you're, uh, trying to make this happen, you're doing the coordination of four separate muscles in your larynx just on that single pitch, right? And so, anytime that you're trying to coordinate the action of four separate muscles, it's going to be bumpy at first. But it's a motor skill. And just like in any athletic endeavor, practice makes perfect. If you practice these exercises enough, yes, they'll be bumpy in the beginning, but eventually, you'll get to the point that you can smooth them out. That smoothing out then allows you to take a pitch that's starting to cause you some of that discomfort and making you feel like you're forcing it, and to change up the vocal fold closure on that pitch. So, if we were doing, uh, "yeah," and that's too pressed, I would take that and I would try to fade towards breathy. Yeah. And I would find that new place that wasn't as gritty. Now, clearly, you saw it bumped on me. Well, first of all, I'm out of shape. I spent all my time teaching, not singing. So, the goal for you singers is to be to the point where it's smooth. But you also heard that I, even out of shape and in a high part of my range, I was able to break out of that stiff, held place by trying to crescendo or decrescendo backwards and then coming back in. And I didn't end up going as far as where I started. And that's the key with this exercise is to play with, uh, the sound until you find the one that works for you. Because there's not any one right sound. We have to find your right sound. And your right sound will show itself, reveal itself, when you get your registration balanced.

Now, let's say that we do that registration work, and you're like, "Yeah, that's not an issue for me. I can do all those things, but I still feel tight. I feel like I'm forcing." First of all, check your breath. Make sure you're not over-breathing. Because a lot of times when I see somebody whose registration is really balanced, I watch them breathe in and immediately contract their abs, or their rib cage just collapses in, and you see all of their neck veins start to pop out, their larynx shoot up. And that's a sign you're putting too much breath pressure underneath those vocal folds. So, check that. If it's not that, then we want to go and do some of those tongue drills that I was showing you when we just did the warm-up section. And so, you're going to want to get this masseter muscle out of the way. Because if this guy contracts and then causes all the muscles underneath of your jaw that are responsible for opening your jaw to get into a fight with this guy, then as you're singing, you have this muscle trying to close, these muscles trying to open, and then tension just creeps all up around your larynx and into your vocal tract. And it can feel really uncomfortable. So, you're just putting your fingers on your cheekbones, dropping it down into the pocket, putting your tongue on the roof of your mouth, and dropping your jaw. This will make sure you don't drop your jaw too far. Aha. Then when you find that position, drop your tongue behind your bottom teeth, uh, and then in there, you're just going to sing pitches and do glides, just making sure the whole time that these muscles are not engaging.

Then the next thing you want to do is do some tongue-out phonation. So, you do the tongue-out hums I just showed you. Or if you want to see how bad your tongue is, try doing it on an "ah" vowel in a mirror. So, you'd be looking in the mirror, sticking your tongue on your bottom lip, and singing "ah." If your tongue is part of the problem, you're going to see that tongue jump backwards when you try to go up in pitch. Not always that extreme, but I've seen a lot of that aren't that extreme. So, if that's the case, you're going to want to start doing some tongue articulation drills. And tongue articulation drills are essentially tongue twisters, right? And so, you can find all kinds of lists of tongue twisters. If you jump over to my blog, it's edwardsvoice.blog, and you search, uh, for categories and you hit "tongue," you will come up with a whole printable list, a PDF you can use of tongue twisters to start building up and improving your articulation. And if you really want to take it to the next level, you're going to want to start studying what's actually happening inside of your vocal tract when you make all these sounds. And so, uh, if you get a chance and you're interested in diving more into that, check out my course. That's how the voice works. How-the-voice-works.com. And, uh, you'll get to see all the images of what's actually in your vocal tract, some MRI images of what happens when we sing. And the workbook has a whole chart showing you exactly where your tongue should be on any given vowel or consonant.

Super. So, I was going to have one thing, and let me know what you think about this. But sometimes, um, you know, if someone's asking this question, you know, how do I know when I'm forcing my voice? First off, if it hurts. Okay? So, I'm just going to give you the simple ones. If it hurts, or you're singing and 15 minutes later, you can't sing anymore. Yeah. Okay, right? Or you're singing, and you know, over a period, over that session of singing, you start to, start losing notes. Okay? It's okay to have your range increase in, in either at the bottom or the top, but it's not necessarily okay to have your range shrink. So, those are, you know, just some very simple answers I would, I would give you, you know, on how to maybe know if you're forcing your voice and then fixing it. Just to summarize what I heard: match your balance. Okay? You want to make sure you have a balanced registration, right? Um, and then you have freedom, and, you know, that you're essentially not, um, pushing, right? Or or making your voice do something that doesn't feel comfortable or safe. So, some simple, simple answers to that. And I think that's why I got so excited once we started talking about the held breath and the exhale. We didn't totally cover all the, yeah, how can I tell if I'm forcing it? But anytime it's feeling like that held breath sensation, you're probably forcing it. Anytime you're turning red in the face or red in the neck, you're probably forcing it. Any time veins are starting to pop out, you're probably forcing it. Part of me, the one exception would be is if you look at your arm and you have a lot of veins that stick out. So, that's not really a lot of veins, that's just light. But if you've got veins that lay high on the surface, and when you just look at your neck, your veins lay high on the surface, that's just your anatomy. Your veins are going to show, and it doesn't necessarily indicate that you're forcing it, right? But if you're somebody like me, whose veins don't show, and all of a sudden they're popping out, you're forcing it. You're pushing it, and you're using too much muscular tension, which is shutting off blood flow to your brain. You know, high notes aren't worth that.

This one. What are ways to sing without damaging your vocal cords? This comes from Marie. So, you know, thinking about, um, voice safety, voice health. So, there's probably a lot of different ways you can answer this one, but, um, yeah, why don't we try and cover a couple, couple ideas here?

Great. So, the vocal folds have a muscle layer, and then you, which you can see in the model, right? So, we have a muscle layer, but over that muscle is a Jell-O. And that Jell-O has multiple layers. So, there's four layers. The top one is called epithelium. The next one is the superficial lamina propria. Then you have the intermediate lamina propria, and then you have the deep layer of the lamina propria. The two upper layers do not have any scar-forming fibers in them. They're meant to take vibration, right? They can handle the load of you using your voice throughout the day. When damage occurs, it's usually because you have pushed past those two upper layers and started shoving the vocal folds together until you start agitating the intermediate and deep layer. And in the intermediate and deep layer are scar-forming fibers. And when you start to agitate them, they start to grow little fingers, and they start to reach up into the upper two layers. And when they grab on to the upper two layers, and if we go back to the Jell-O, if I stuck my hand down into a bowl of Jell-O and then whacked the Jell-O, it's not going to bounce the way that it did when my hand wasn't in it, right? So, once you start getting those scar-forming fibers going up into that vocal fold tissue, it becomes more stiff. And then as it stiffens up, we start to see the vocal folds not vibrate as well. They start to dry out and swell. And before you know it, you can end up with what are called nodules, which is where you basically cause almost like little blisters. It's like if you rub your fingers together all day until they both started blistering up in the same spot, that's what nodules are like. Or if you slam them together hard enough, you can end up bursting a blood vessel that's inside of your vocal folds, which we call a hemorrhage. Lots of people hemorrhage on a regular basis when they have bronchitis or a cold or the flu. But most of the time, they feel so terrible, they're just trying to rest and sleep, they've lost their voice, but they just assume they're sick, and the hemorrhage heals on its own. But if you're a singer and you're in a gig, and all of a sudden you feel like your voice just snaps and something pops, and then your voice is gone, or it's not quite there, that's a good indication that you've hemorrhaged. And if you keep singing on that hemorrhage, eventually that blood burst blood vessel can start to form a pool of blood that then develops into a blood-filled polyp. And polyps are not good. Sometimes they go away on their own. More often than not, they require surgery, right? And cysts are something that can happen either from abuse, or they can just happen from bad luck, right? We all know family members or people have had a cyst automatically just, you know, show up on their shoulder or on the back of their leg. A cyst can show up on your vocal fold. That's not your fault. It's just something we got to get taken care of. So, in essence, the way that we don't damage our vocal cords is we don't agitate those bottom layers. Because any agitation of those bottom layers starts getting us into the danger zone. Now, we can use some of these sounds every once in a while. For most people, going "yeah," ain't gonna cause any kind of a problem, right? But if you try to do that for three hours of a gig, and that's the only way you sing, and then you try to do another gig the next night, and another the next night, you're probably going to start getting in, uh, into the situation when you're drying up those folds, and they're getting so swollen that you are in the danger zone, right? Some people are not prone to issues, and other people seem to get them very easily, right? We still have a lot of research to do before we fully understand why that is. But there is definitely, you know, differences in endurance, just like we see differences in endurance with athletes. There are some athletes who can, you know, run marathons, no big deal. I can't run around the block. So, you know, and if I practice on it for a long time, it will probably get maxed out at the block. A marathon is not my future. So, you know, some voices are going to be able to do things that other voices can't. So, that's why it's important to embrace your voice and do what your voice can do. It's important to remember artistically that we have plenty of other artists out there already, right? We already have an Adele, we already have an Ariana Grande, we already have a Selena Gomez, we already have a Lizzo. We don't need another, right? We don't know what we need yet. And the only way we're going to discover it is if singers bring their authentic voice to the table. Because when they're themselves and they do what their voice naturally does, that's when they're going to reach peak, peak performance. Trying to make your voice sound like someone else is always a recipe for disaster.

So, in order to tell if this is where you're going, we're going to return to that held breath test. If you find that you, uh, are singing with a lot of that held breath sensation, that "ah" sensation when you sing, you're probably putting too much pressure on those folds, and you do need to figure out how to lighten that up, right? Because otherwise, you could end up damaging your vocal cords. Because what will happen is, some days you're going to be fine, and you can sing with that pressed sound, and you've drunk enough water the day before, uh, every, your hormones are all in balance, and you go to sing, and it feels good. But then two days later, and there might be a hormonal shift in your body, maybe you didn't drink enough water the night before, maybe you've had some acid reflux, your vocal folds are going to be a little dried out. You're going to try to sing on them with that same pressed sound, and it's not going to work. So, you're going to work harder than normal. Then the next day, you have a gig, and now your voice is exhausted, and you don't understand why it's not doing what you want. And then that's how you start getting into a cycle that can lead you into trouble. So, to prevent yourself from even getting in that place, you need to make sure that however you're singing, you're capable of doing it not only on your best day, but on a day where you only feel like 70% of yourself. And to do that, you're gonna have to gain control of the balance of your registration, right? The way that your vocal folds vibrate to produce sound. You want to make sure that they can produce breathy tones, edgy tones, and everything in between. You want to be able to take some of those edgy tones and put more air or less air in them. So, I should be able to go and put all kinds of variations of squeeze and release inside of that, right? They're not supposed to be performance sounds. Those aren't sounds I want to put in a song, but I need to have the coordination in order to get my voice to react to my storyteller and just make those changes. And if you can't make them on a single exercise, your body's not going to be able to do it in the course of a song. The other thing that you need to do is always make sure that you're staying hydrated. And that means drinking water and plenty of it. Uh, the general guideline, yeah, cheers. Um, the general guideline is half your body weight in ounces a day. So, I'm a big guy, I'm six foot four, I weigh 220 pounds, so I'd have to drink 110 ounces of water a day. It's a lot, but in the summer, it's doable. You can throw cucumbers in there, strawberries in there, you could do lemon in there, or lime. But if you have acid reflux, it's probably not the best thing to throw in there. But, um, you know, just get your water intake up because that's going to keep the, uh, Jell-O-like layer of your vocal folds nice and Jell-O-like, right? And bouncy. And that is another thing that can really help reduce the risk of injury. Singing on dried-out vocal folds is not usually a good idea.

Awesome. So, I was going to add to this, just a very simple, that's got the more way more technical, complex answers, but, um, find your, if you know, you're going to know your, stay within your limits, is what I'm trying to say. You know, find those boundaries, right? So, you got a low note, you got a high note, um, just stay within your boundaries. And then you also have safe boundaries for the amount of volume and intensity, right? I think we've talked about the overload principle. Yeah. And there's definitely times that you want to maybe overload certain muscles as you're doing in your training, but you don't want to be overloading your voice all the time. So, you know, that goes, um, you know, warm up, make sure you stay within your boundaries, stay safe, sing healthy. And, you know, if you do think you're doing something that's a little questionable, that's a great time to work with a coach or get some video feedback or schedule a session and go, "Hey, this is what I'm saying, I'm doing this, and this keeps happening," and get feedback on that. But the last thing is to do it without any guidance or any supervision and do it over and over again. You know, you could be asking for some trouble. And, um, you know, there's a lot of people that can sing naturally, and that's great. But eventually, you always hear that they're, they're probably going to have to figure it out. And you want to try and avoid figuring it out the hard way, which would be to mess it up and then go learn. So, just some words of wisdom there.

Anything else? Nah, sounds good. Next one then. So, now moving to, how do you know if your voice is damaged? This one comes from Zack. So, good. So, there, the only true way to know if your voice is damaged is to go to a laryngologist. A laryngologist is a doctor who, a lot of times, they will work in an ear, nose, and throat practice, but a laryngologist has actually done some extra schooling studying only the voice. Then, what the laryngologist is going to do is use what's called a stroboscope. And what they're going to do is they're going to have you stick out your tongue, and they're going to stick a small camera into the back of your mouth like that. And then they're going to tell you to sing. And when you're seeing the little camera on the tip of the little rod that they use, is going to be able to look right down on your vocal folds, and it's going to give you a picture of what your vocal folds are doing when you're making sound. All right? It's pain-free. If you have a gag reflex, you'll gag a little bit, but doctors have tricks of how to squeeze your tongue with, uh, gauze and tell you to sing an "ee" vowel, which can take away some of the gagging feeling of it as well, right? Um, but that's really the only way they can tell is to get in there and get an actual image of the vocal folds themselves.

Now, sound-wise, there are a few little things that you can do. The first one is to do, uh, what I call the head voice test. And the idea with the head voice test is to try to glide from your lowest pitch all the way up to your highest pitch and back down. And you should be able to go and do it.

There shouldn't be any gaps. If you go to do that, and you get a massive gap like this, you need to pay attention because, yeah, an indication that there's a bump on your vocal folds. And when you're gliding down, you hit that little small spot where the bump is just in the right place where it's going to stop those vocal folds from phonating. And then as you go down in your range, you'll get into a spot where the bump doesn't interfere, and you'll get your voice back. But that little disappearing zone of notes is an indication you need to go get checked. Anytime that you see a drastic voice change, that's something that you want to pay attention to. So, it could be something like, you used to, your voice used to be able to go louder, and now it doesn't. That's something that you want to look into. Uh, not necessarily if it was soft and now you can sing loud, that just means you've been learning technique. But anyway, I'm going to go and, you know, reverse. You were doing things that you're capable of doing, and now you can't do those, and now you're struggling to do some of the things that used to be pretty easy to you. That's an indication you need to go in and see a laryngologist. If you start having pitch issues when you didn't have pitch issues, you know, and it's getting, if it's simultaneously feeling a little bit harder to sing, you probably should go get that looked at as well. Um, if you've been having bad bouts of acid reflux, where you're getting heartburn at night, and you're noticing your voice isn't the same the next day, go see a doctor. They can give you some treatment options that can help reduce the reflux because when you're sleeping at night, uh, the acid comes up your esophagus and actually drips right onto your vocal folds, and so it can give you lots of problems. Um, but the main thing is is just listening for those changes and noticing that, you know, I have been working a little bit harder than normal with my voice, and it's starting to make some weird sounds I don't like. You know, sometimes we're just having an allergy attack. So, give it 48, 72 hours. Most of the time, if I have a student, a client who reaches out to me and says they're feeling something's wrong in there, uh, you know, and they're not sure what's going on, I tell them to give it a week. I'd say 99% of the time, they were getting sick and they just didn't know it, right? And there's only a few instances where we found with the one student, it was three weeks later, their voice was still getting bad, and she had just finished an international tour, picked up a virus along the way that paralyzed one of her vocal folds, and she went all through therapy, got her voice back. But, you know, there's weird stuff that can happen that has nothing to do with you singing wrong. She was doing great, and then she woke up one day and her voice just.

wasn't quite there and it went downhill. So, you know, anytime you're feeling something that's dragging on for more than a week, it's probably worth reaching out and trying to see if you can get an appointment with a laryngologist.

If you start hearing, um, gravel or raspiness or something like that, what if it's like you're hearing like, "Oh, I didn't have that." You know, absolutely how an effect you're going for. But yeah, no, that's again another thing. So it goes into me, those drastic voice changes. It used to be clear and now it's starting to get gravely or muddy. That's an indication that you also need to go get something checked. And when you're getting things checked, they may even find out, uh, you know, it's a prescription that you've been given.

I recently had a student, uh, that we were working with, and his voice just fell apart. And this is somebody who was singing incredibly and, um, you know, as one of the star singers in our program, and it just got worse and worse every week. So I was at the point, I was like, "You've got to go get scoped. I don't know what's going on." Goes and gets scoped, and his vocal folds are fine, except they're really dry and they're really red. And the doctor asked him what medications, uh, this person was on, and they said Accutane. And there are a few studies out there that Accutane, in a very small percentage of patients, can cause severe drying of the larynx. And this student was one of those really tiny percentages. He ended up having that, uh, got off the Accutane, his voice came back.

I had another student, I heard, I know I had one student I heard in an audition one time, and his voice sounded veiled and it sounded very dull. And I was like, "Have you ever scoped?" And he said, "No." And I told him, you know, "You want to go get that scoped. Go get that looked at because that doesn't sound, uh, like everything's doing what it needs to do." Went in to get scoped, turned out he had a yeast infection on his vocal folds because he was using an inhaler. And inhalers are known to cause candida, is what they call it, because it's usually in your mouth, but it can get onto your vocal folds. And your average person is not going to notice that. They're going to be like, "That, whatever, my voice is dry." But the singers can feel it. So he was using this inhaler, wasn't rinsing his mouth like he was supposed to. Doctors, I'll tell you to rinse your mouth after you use it. Didn't do that. Got candida on his vocal folds. Good news was is it was a seven-day series of antibiotics, I think it was, and clear. And we are back into business, right?

So it can, a lot of times, don't get freaked out. A lot of the things that happen to people's voices are minor things. They give you a pill, they give you a shot, or they put you on voice rest. They tell you to get voice therapy. And voice therapy is basically six weeks of free voice lessons that your health insurance pays for, or you only got to pay the co-pay on, right? So go get them. Right when they offer you voice therapy, you should jump up and down because most voice therapists would charge you $150 an hour outside of the doctor's office. And if you've got a $25 co-pay, you just got your insurance company to give you a massive discount on voice training. So take advantage of it because voice therapy works wonders. And there are so many things that they used to try to only fix with surgery that they're finding they can now fix with, uh, voice therapy. And so, yeah, awesome.

Okay, so that gives you guys plenty and plenty of different things to think about and keep your voice, uh, safe and healthy. Now, here's one that, um, comes up, uh, for a lot of people. It could be a lot of different professions, not even necessarily singers. Um, you could be working in a job where you talk on the phone all day long in a call center or whatever it is. But how do you take care of my exhausted? How do I take care of my exhausted voice? This comes from Zoe. So this is a great, um, voice health question. What do you have some suggestions here? What can we do?

So first of all, make sure you're hydrated because a lot of times when people are fearing vocal exhaustion, yeah, they're, you know, they're using their voice a lot, they're forgetting to drink water, and that can be a problem. Uh, avoid alcohol. That's, uh, hard for performers sometimes, but it dries you out. Avoid caffeine if you can. I know I myself have really struggled without my daily coffee. Coffee, and again, that can dry you out. So if you're running into problems, you probably want to try to cut back. That if you're drinking enough water, it's not gonna bother you, but you need to get yourself to that point.

Um, if it doesn't feel good, you can use a steam inhaler. This, the warmth of the steam inhaler, oftentimes is very comforting to your throat. We're now finding out that the steam itself doesn't do much for your vocal folds, but nebulized saline does. So if you get onto Amazon or you get on to any other retailer's website and you look up a nebulizer, N-E-B-U-L-I-Z-E-R, you'll find plenty of options. You can get them for around $50. And then again, through Amazon or through any pharmacy, you should be able to buy medical grade saline. On Amazon, I buy it in these little pink, uh, break apart little bottles. So they're like one-dose uses. You take a little bit of that medical grade saline, you dump it in that nebulizer, and then you inhale it. And what we're finding out is that the composition of the mucosa that covers the vocal folds is more saline in nature than just water-based. And so we're finding that people who use these nebulizers get better results and actually feel like they're feeling improvements with their vocal quality and not just, uh, you know, feeling more comfortable as they were feeling with the steam.

Then what you want to do is probably take maybe some vocal rest for 24 hours or so, if you can, right? We used to say absolute vocal rest. We're finding now that probably doesn't necessarily help a whole lot. So in vocal rest, I'm saying don't be talking to people on the phone, uh, don't be having, you know, going out with friends, don't be having big long conversations with, you know, your roommates or your partner. Instead, you know, try to take it easy. Have a Netflix day. Um, a lot of times that will reduce some of that swelling and it'll start making things feel better.

On the next day, when you go back to using your voice after your rest, you're going to want to start off with just easy humming because humming actually comes into what we call semi-occluded vocal tract exercises. And these exercises help balance the airflow across your vocal folds and help set your vocal folds up into a more optimal vibrational pattern, uh, than you would find with some open vowel warm-ups. So we're just going to start with easy single pitches, just in the mid part of your range. Do those, take a break, come back a couple hours later, do them again, take a break, come back a couple hours later, do them again. If they tickle your nose like that one just did with mine, and pinch your nose up here. [Music] Kind of touch your hands on the side. You can pinch your totally shut, but, you know, I have students that have these ways they like to touch their nose to stop the tickles. It's allergy season here in Virginia. But, um, yeah, so you can do those hums and then try to warm up in your falsetto to really stretch that vocal fold out. You're just going to do that several times throughout the day as well. If you're doing those slow hums and those, uh, head voice glides throughout the day, it should start helping get your vocal folds re, uh, you know, positioned into that optimal place, getting the airflow to me running again. And by doing the humming again, you're warming up that mucosa. If you're drinking the water and you and your nebulized saline, you should start to see improvements in about 72 hours.

Great. Now, I was going to add in, I think it was, um, you know, doctor, you know, they mentioned, uh, mentioned something about using a straw throughout the day, just, you know, when it's out of time or just a short little brief time, but multiple times during the day. Would have to go, you know, look up the, do you know the exact recommendations on that? Because I know, yeah, it's a theme like five to ten minutes of using the straw.

So the straw is, uh, I wish I had some here. We switched offices and I think I'm strawed out. Yeah, I am. So, um, but anyways, what you're essentially doing is just putting the straw between your lips, wrapping your lips around it, and then singing through the straw. And again, that eliminate or limits the amount of force that you can use with your voice, so you don't overblow. And it helps create this backward flow of air that can help your vocal folds close. And we have stroboscopy images that show us that when people sing through straws, their pharynx, their, uh, the area right above their vocal tract can actually open up a little bit, and it releases some of that pressure and things just relax. So that's why so many people are so hip into, uh, you know, straw phonation. It really does work, and it's a great thing. We should, I know, I guess we should invite on here just to talk about straws one day, maybe. Yeah.

Awesome. So try some of those suggestions. Let's check if we have any comments, um, here real quick. Um, Tracy, thanks for tuning in. Tracy. Janice, thanks for attending. Larissa, thank you as well. So, um, don't have any new questions. So it's almost an hour, guys. Thanks for tuning in. Matt, do you have any final words?

No, that's it. I mean, just remember with all these things, the more that you learn about your instrument, the smarter you'll be as a musician, and the easier it's going to be to reach your optimal singing, uh, voice, right? So many people just are shooting blindly in the dark. They're trying to figure out, they're struggling. And if they can just spend a little bit of time learning about their instrument and how it works, they can start making huge gains and really kick everything and their, uh, vocal development into overdrive.

Awesome. I was going to ask you, do you, do you find that sharing the links for the nebulizer and the saline solution so we can drop those in at the end? Not right now. Yes, I'll do it after because on my side, I don't have an option to do that. But yes, afterwards, we can do that.

Awesome. Great. All right, thanks for tuning in everybody. We'll see you next Thursday. Thank you.