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Vocal health and removal of ‘hoarse-ness’ (Singing Teachers)
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Hey Lily, just listened to the recordings!
On a side note, I ended up taking on my own hoarse/scratchy voiced student. She said she had bad acid reflux, which was probably the cause, but it was causing her enough problems that I decided to send her to an ENT before seeing her again. It might be nothing, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry with this kind of stuff.
But anyway, on to your student, it doesn’t sound like there are any serious problems to me. The scratchiness is only light, and could just be allergies or a minor irritation. But the air-escapage, that’s something different. And that’s definitely the thing you want to address.
So basically, the gist of it is that she is not connecting to her chest voice or “modal voice”. You can hear this from the breathy “heady” sound of her voice throughout the range, and also in her tendency to be slightly sharp (it sounds like she’s hovering down to the note from above at times). This is unsurprising for an operatically trained singer. In opera, female sopranos are often not taught about chest voice at all and are not even asked to sing below C4, which becomes functionally problematic in the long term (especially if they want to sing contemporary music, which is much more chest dominant).
If you’re wondering how to correct this, you could start with speaky sounds or twangy sounds from the bottom, on a /nae/ sound, for example. I remember Matt Pocock posted a blog about this some time ago, but really, register habilitation and balancing is the work of Bel Canto (IVA, SLS, etc.). If you’d ever like a quick lesson with me to talk about chest voice/head voice balancing, let me know :). If you’d like some reading material, one of my favourite pedagogues in this area is Cornelius Reid, and you’ll find some free articles on his website- http://www.corneliuslreid.com/ . I also LOVE a book called The Naked Voice by Stephen Smith, which features a beautiful way to introduce the registers using natural speaking sounds, and includes a cd for exercise examples, which is very helpful.
Hope that sets you on the right track!
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You star!!! Thank you so so much. This really makes sense. I’ll send her over some warm-ups and exercises now. I agree about the classical training might be detrimental to her new contemporary way of singing I was just unsure on whether I was sending her in the wrong direction.
Brilliant! thanks again Kat. All the best xxxxx
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All good, Lily, glad to be of help! xx
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