So. Yes. I'm going through a rough patch at the moment and I wondered if anyone else had come through anything similar.

I've been singing for most of my life, but I was taught abysmally for most of that time and at the beginning of this summer it finally caught up with me. It turned out I had muscular diplophonia and my cords weren't meeting properly any more - I'd been singing for eight years with no support whatsoever, my larynx was practically up around my ears and for some reason I'd been lucky and got away with it up until then.

Since the middle of June I've been taking lessons with a new teacher, who's incredible and who has already almost erased the problem. The issue now is that I've had to start from scratch. I was developing a fabulous vibrato, preparing for Grade 8 and learning to ornament, and suddenly all of that is gone and I hate it. Even though I know I wasn't doing things right before, it just hurts so much to hear myself. And I'm not really allowed to sing at all unsupervised, not even humming along to a recording, which is the worst thing of all. Up until recently I was doing okay, but lately I've just sunk into a depression - it feels like everyone's been doing choral courses and opera courses and competitions and just SINGING, dammit, and I'm stuck here, back where I started.

I feel like maybe I'm not meant to be a singer. I wanted to go to music college and go into opera professionally but I just can't see it happening, and there's nothing else I want to do. I have no idea how long it'll take before I can really sing again (if I'll ever be able to) and it breaks my heart. I was never particularly talented, but I worked so hard, and it feels like it's come to nothing.

I'd really love to hear from other singers who've been (or currently are) in the same situation. It's impossible to get a non-singer to understand, and I'd be so interested to hear about how those of you with vocal issues have coped.

Thank you so much,

-Emma (Satine)

Oh dear, I'm so sorry to hear that! It must be awful! I think I would be absolutely devasated if I ended up with a vocal problem. I can't really give you any advice as I've not been in this situation before, but I can relate somewhat just because I'm a singer and I've thought before how bad it would be if something like that happened. If you don't mind me asking, how exactly did it happen and how did you find out about it?

It basically came from singing entirely from my throat with my larynx riding REALLY high up in my vocal tract. I'm a soprano with a coloratura range and I was being trained as a mezzo belter, so I think that's probably why. My cords eventually stopped meeting properly because the root of my tongue was pressing against them, and I started noticing a kind of double pitch when I sang certain notes...the intended note would come out, but a harmonic would come out with it. It took a really long time to get it recognised because it's not a particularly common problem, but eventually I found an article about it on the internet here, and emailed the man who wrote it, who directed me to his UK associate under whom I'm now studying.

It seems it was only a matter of time before something went wrong because my technique was so bad, and I would have had to train from scratch anyway. I've been lucky that the problem's habit-based and not a physiological thing like vocal nodules.

I've become quite good at talking about it rather clinically, lol.

Hi Satine

I'm sorry you've had to suffer this. However, I'm glad you've found someone to help you address the problem.

I had vocal difficulties in my early twenties, and it was entirely my own silly fault. I was working as a telephone operator in Directory Enquiries while I was at Uni, and in the November I was there, I caught a cold, which over the course of a couple of days moved down to my throat. I could feel my speaking voice going long before that was audible, and I asked my supervisor if I could stop my shift and go home. She said no, I had to do the last four hours of my shift - during which time I, a good and conscientious little employee, continued giving out numbers to callers, and thereby talked away the remains of my voice. Totally. The next morning I had the most acute laryngitis - I couldn't even whisper to the doctor who signed me off work. The 100% lack lasted for over a month (so a carol-less Christmas), and even after I could speak again, the damage to my singing voice lasted for ages - it was over a year before it was fully right again. Looking back, I should have insisted on going home, and should have stood up to the supervisor.

That was fourteen years before my first singing lesson, though, so the damage was very much history by the time I started learning how to use my voice properly.

The one thing I'd say to you is that time is very much on your side. You've just done GCSE's, so you have a couple of years before you could even start to think of music college - and a lot of singers don't go until they're graduates in their mid-twenties - which is AGES away. You have a teacher who's helping you through the problem....at an age when a lot of singers haven't even started having lessons. Grade 8 and all the other good stuff will still be there for you to do once you're back to proper fitness, and you may find that your "grown-up" voice is even better than your previous voice was.

Use the time that you can't sing to bring up other music skills - the piano's always a useful ability for a singer, and some of the higher level theory exams will help you to understand the more complex stuff you'll be singing later when you do diplomas. This is something I wish I'd done - it would make the stuff I'm learning now a lot easier to understand. It will also stand you in good stead for your technical studies at music college. Listen to singers on recordings or in performance, and examine their technique and performance tricks critically, see if there's anything you might use later on. Also use this listening to give yourself some repertoire ideas for when you're ready.

Good luck, Satine.

Cheers

Katyjay

Im am considerable younger, but just yesterday I(my singing teacher) discovered I had gotten into an extremly bad habit of singing without supporting the sound! My voice is always changing so after yesterdays lesson(being forced to sing in my mature "opera" voice for a full half hour) my voice is now completely shattered! my throat is killing me so i don't know exactly what i have done to it, but it seems like i will also have to change or re-learn my technique.

Char

Singing shouldn't ever hurt. If it does, stop at once as something's going wrong. Tell your teacher if something's uncomfortable, and get him/her to go back to basic technique again to figure out what's causing the hurt.

Cheers

Katyjay

Thanks so much for the responses so far

Char, it sounds as though your singing teacher needs to take you back a bit and work out exactly what it is that you're doing wrong, then address it. In the short-term, it might be a good idea to try not to sing or speak at all for 24 hours just to give your cords time to calm down a little, and don't do too much on your own until you know which bits of your technique you need to spend time on refining. In all honesty, I'm surprised your teacher didn't pick up on it before if it's been a long-term issue, but go back to him/her and ask to be taken through a couple of basics again.

Good luck.

Well I found out something interesting at my voice lesson today. Over the summer I played the lead in Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella and I used my "stage voice" which made me much louder and stronger sounding. My teacher has since been encouraging me to sing that way but I just didn't think it "felt" right so today I asked her about it and it turns out that I've developed my chest voice very well, so well that she hadn't even realized that that's what I'd been doing. As a result, I've lost a lot of ground in my head voice. So now I have to find (again) my resonance and point of sound and all that stuff in my head voice so that I can re-learn to blend my registers. It's quite frusterating because my voice breaks right in the middle range and I'm preparing for district choral auditions and the music is all in the middle range! I guess that's not exactly a vocal problem, but it could have turned into one if we hadn't caught it. She said my voice is "deceptive"...hehe

It's interesting that you say this - over-developing my chest voice was what eventually tipped me over the edge and stopped me from being able to sing. So glad you caught it in time, and I'm glad that you're addressing it. Has your teacher suggested using only head voice for a while? That's begun to straighten out the middle-range breaks (which I've had trouble with too) for me, as well as slowly correcting my other problems.

Hope you get it sorted quickly .

-Emma

Well the thing is that it didn't hurt when I sang but a while afterwards, but it just might have been that i was getting sick,I took a couple of days off school and im just recovering now. Doctor says that i have extremly inflammed tonsils or something so I think it was that which made it sore!

What does that mean? Anyone able to tell me in layman's terms? I had (mistakenly!) thought that head voice just referred to a man's falsetto, but clearly not...

Completely ignorant with singing! Any clarification appreciated!

Head-voice is a term also used for women.

I have some what of a related problem. I am a soprano with a very high set voice. I can not sing low at all. It hurts and sounds downright awful. My voicce teacher recongnizes this and she doesn't have me do anything in the lower range. But she has me do some things in the middle range, and I have a little issue with my voice in the middle range. She once had me do "On My Own" from "Les Mis." Now, if you are familiar with the song, you know that it goes down to a low A, (which I did have some trouble with but now is managable) and slowly builds up and up to a C (on the staff). As Eponine gets higher, her voice is supposed to do this really amazing thing were it stays deep and smoky but goes up to a strong, higher chest voice. Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about? Well, anyway, if I'm making any sense at all, I can't do it. I find it exteremly painful to reach this effect. To make it not hurt, I have to switch into head voice at a B, which completely throughs off the entire flow and feel of the song. Does anyone else have this issue, or at least understand what I am trying to get across?

I know what you're talking about with the "higher chest voice". I'm quite good at it which is why I temporarily lost the "point" in my head voice. From what I understand, you really shouldn't bring your chest voice up very high, at least not on a regular basis. It's not very healthy.



Yes, I'm working on bringing my head voice down so that I can blend it with my chest at the bottom.

Oh Satine, I am so so sorry to hear what's been happening to you. You must be feeling so sad and frustrated by it all. I can't really add any more advice than what's already been voiced above. Just to say that I am thinking of you, and hope that the situation resolves sooner rather than later. But don't push it. I've only been singing for a couple of years, but I love it so much. Even though I spend much of my time thinking that my voice isn't very good, at least I can sing. To be told not to sing under any circumstances sounds horrible.

Gentle hug (if that's ok?)

Amber
x

I'm going to go through these posts methodically .


Sarah-flute-

The best description I can come up with for this is that you can feel the vibration of the sound in your skull when you're singing in head voice rather than lower down in your body when you sing in chest voice, if that makes sense...there's a better explanation of it in the middle of this page, and a way to illustrate the difference to yourself at the bottom. Head voice is separate from falsetto in men...falsetto is above the head register, though for most men I think there's a crossover (a bit hazy on men's voices...anyone care to correct or advise accordingly?). Hopefully this makes sense?




Ultrasoprano-

This "higher chest voice" is one of the (many) definitions of belting, and has a lot to do with how I damaged my own voice (which flips into head voice naturally at about Bb above middle C - I overdeveloped my belt hugely during a run of a show I was in until I could get to a C#, which doesn't sound like a huge difference, but it was the last straw for my poor little cords). It is possible to learn how to belt at least reasonably healthily (Bernadette Peters being a great example of a musical theatre actress who's mastered this) so that it doesn't hurt as you've mentioned, but it's much harder for some voice types than others to do safely. If you want to learn how to do it, ask your teacher if she is willing to teach belting or if she knows anyone who's more of an expert in it. Above all, be careful, and stop as soon as anything hurts. Good luck!



Amber-
Thanks for the support. I'm coping okay, and in all honesty I've learnt so much about the voice through all of this that it's almost a good thing I'm hoping that in the long term I'll be a better singer because of what's happened. It means a lot to me that you wrote this (and who am I to refuse a hug? ) The very best of luck in your own singing (and that applies to everyone here, y'know...)

Satine, thank you, that page really cleared it up for me!

Ok, now I'm confused about something. I was on answers.com and looking under "Belting". Here's part of what it said:

"False belting is technique of making a note in head voice sound strong and powerful by pulling the vibration from out the mask, and pulling larynx down to create a sharper sound. The difference in true belting is a false belt is still in head voice. A true belted note will sound like its being "pushed" up high."

When I belt, it feels like a combination of my chest and my head. So what was I doing and how do you tell?

The larynx is lifted during belting, per se. If you're false belting, you're pulling it down. The easiest way to tell what you're doing is just to touch the bump at the front of your throat where your larynx lives (very very gently) on either side, then do whatever it is you're doing. If you can feel the larynx rising you're probably belting. It does sound, though, from your description, as though you're false belting, but you might want to try this and see.

thank you so much satine! i'm glad someone understands what i am trying to do. for me a Bb is even a push- but thanks so much for the awesome explanation and advice!!!
christina

Have you tried using MIDDLE register? The one that hardly anyone tells us about... it normally gets fobbed off as "mixing" between bottom & top register, when in fact it is actually a register in it's own right.

As you rise from bottom register (chest voice) allow all the resonance to enter your mouth & leave the chest cavity BEFORE you go into top register (head voice) where the resonance enters the sinuses. A clear, bright, resonant sound can be achieved without "belting" (provided that the vocal folds remain aducted - the temptation will be to push too much air across them); placing the resonance at the front palette or the dome of the mouth can produce a "throw it to the back of the room!" kind of sound, placing the resonance at the rear palette produces a mellower sound - it is a lot healthier for the voice (I was taught & strongly believe that the only way to maintain a healthy larynx is to use ALL of your voice, not just the bit at the bottom or the bit at the top!). Once you have found this middle register, you will be surprised at how low & high it can go (obviously it won't reach the low extremeties of the bottom register or the high extremeties of top, but you will find that, with practice, it is of equal size to these registers & overlaps perfectly down the middle).

Check out this article:

http://www.voiceteacher.com/middle_voice.html

This is really interesting, and the attached article too. But I still seem to have difficulty controlling my larynx. My teacher tells me to keep a "yawny" feeling in my throat - is this a way of keeping the larynx low do you think? (I can't ask him because he's gone away on hols for three weeks.)



Amber
x

This is the main way to lower your larynx, yes (when you actually yawn properly it goes down a really long way, further than it should when you sing, but nonetheless it illustrates the point). My teacher talks about having an "errrrhhhhhhhh" feeling, but in the throat rather than in the mouth, if that makes sense...play around with it and see what works for you. Making sure that your jaw is always down and back plays a big part in lowering the larynx as well.

(I'm good on laryngeal position...it's one of the things I've had to concentrate on )

Incidentally, my teacher's also on holiday. Maybe all music teachers secretly go away together to gossip about their pupils in a special Music Teacher's Land. Or maybe I've been drinking too much chai *shrugs*

Satine,

I'm sorry you're going through a rough time with your voice at the minute. A few months ago I was preparing for my grade 7 singing exam, a solo concert, my AS performance in music and many concerts with my choir. I caught a common, normal cold which turned in to 6 weeks with no voice. I was distraught and even more so when my singing teacher realised and casually said " oh it's not there is it?!" So I do know how you feel. All I can suggest is carry on what you're doing, I could sing unsupervised, and I couldn't speak unnecessarily. The more stressed out you become, the worse the voice will become. As a mezzo I lost most of my notes above C and I oftem got very depressed, refusing to sing on my own as it would often crack. But I took care of it. My singing teacher advised me on two things that helped my voice to come back: 1. Gargle with Bicarbonate of soda in water every morning- it draws out any infection that may be there 2. Inhale Friars Bolson in steam every so often, smells bad but clears you out. 3. If your voice is sore you can get Merocaine's, they are a lozenges that numb your throat and are medicated as well. They do work.

Just be careful and listen to the advice. And don't get frustrated that you had to start from scratch, at least now it's right and you will get it back. Time will fly I promise!!!!

Hugs and best wishes

Hannabanna36