Sing Free Now! Blog

Popular grammy-winning singer-songwriter John Mayer recently had to cancel all of his performances and the release of his upcoming album due to vocal problems. He has what is called a granuloma, a type of growth, on his vocal cords. This type of problem often stems from lack of good vocal technique.

What I think is interesting here is not that this happened to a popular singer—I can’t tell you how many times famous national act singers have to cancel performances, parts of tours or entire tours due to “vocal fatigue”, laryngitis, exhaustion or other code words for voice problems. What’s surprising is how many of my voice students are shocked that a singer of this stature has voice problems at all.

Support is the most important principle in singing. Without it, everything else in the development of your voice is like painting a used car and calling it new. The major issues will still be present; they’ll just be covered up with a pretty veneer. I sang professionally for 10 years with absolutely no concept of support and it was very difficult for me to maintain my voice during that time. I got hoarse often, had serious trouble singing high notes; if I sang a song loudly and aggressively, I couldn’t come right back and sing one cleanly and gently. I often spent my days worrying about whether my voice would work that night. It wasn’t a lot of fun to have so little control over my voice but I believed that that was what singers had to go through.

If it’s not measurable, it’s not valuable

I’ve often had students attempt to describe what they hear in a recording of their own voice. “That’s awful,” “It sounds terrible,” or “I don’t like it” may be the first words out of their mouths. When I ask someone to elaborate, most of the time they use the same types of phrases to repeat the same theme. The problem with this approach is that nothing measurable is being described and it is extremely difficult to change a vocal performance when you can’t measure it. So how do you measure what you’re singing?

Cooling down after a vocal performance is just as important as warming up. Because we are dealing with muscles, they must be warmed up before being exerted and cooled down afterwards to help prevent stiffening. The main reasons to warm-up and stretch out muscles are: 1) to prevent injury, 2) to be able to work longer before tiring, and 3) to increase range of motion. Too many singers do too little warm up before singing and then are disappointed in the results.

Too many singers do too little warm up before singing and then are disappointed in the results. Merely singing a couple of scales or running through a song lightly on the way to a performance is not an efficient way to warm up.

When moving from a high note to a low note, very often singers experience the low note becoming noisy, breathy, out of tune, or unstable.  This may seem strange in that you would probably agree that singing a low note should be easier than singing a high note. Why the trouble?  Here is what can often happen.

I got a call early yesterday from radio station KPAM in Portland, OR wanting to know if I could be interviewed live on the Bob Miller morning show to talk about how Christina Aguilera screwed up the National Anthem at the Super Bowl. I agreed, and during the 20 minutes before they called me back, I jumped on the Internet to review her performance. As I listened to it again, I couldn’t really see or hear what the fuss was. And, oh, what a fuss there was!

I was working with one of my students and he relayed having blown out his voice at a performance because he couldn't hear.  Being able to hear yourself when you sing is very important but is not always what happens.

If you're performing through a sound system you may not have monitors, you may not be able to hear the monitors, you may be trying to sing above music that is very loud or for whatever reason the acoustics of the room may cause you not to be able to hear yourself.

Circadian rhythms are the pattern of human biological activity in a 24-hour period, and there is definitely a connection between circadian rhythms and singing. People will find that if they are used to singing early in the morning, as in church choir singers, that their body learns to expect to do what it has to do to sing early in the morning and will have a much more difficult time doing what it has to do to sing later in the evening.

The opposite is true of many people who sing in bands and perform in bars or nightclubs. Singers who are accustomed to singing in the evening and are then suddenly faced with a gig that is early in the morning may not be prepared to respond in the way they need to. It takes practice and awareness to be able sing at a different time than your body is used to.