hey chris liepe here with the first thing you should do and for a long time the first thing
i've done when i feel like i've taken my voice too far and maybe hurt it now there's a lot of
paranoia that goes along with your voice not feeling right after you've overdone it
and part of what i want to do in this video is dispel some of the myths that
fear plants in your brain about hurting your voice so that you can move forward in confidence
yeah not doing stupid things to hurt your voice but also not be paralyzed by fear if
you feel like you have done something that's not the greatest for your voice
if you'd like more help with your voice in general and you want to make sure that you
know your voice's limits and that you know how to support it so that you don't screw it up
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all right the first thing to do when you feel like you've messed up your voice
this is a neat test and it's gonna come as a surprise to many of you we're going to borrow from
clearing your throat you say what
everybody tells me that clearing your throat is so bad for your voice why would we bart well because
there is an okay way to clear your throat and we're not really going to be going all out and
clearing a bunch of phlegm out of our throat we're going to borrow from it adjust it a little bit
and experiment with feel and we're going to notice a few things okay here it is
m
notice we're not going
we're not doing that doing that creates all sorts of stuff sensations
uh brashness uh dryness in the lower part of our throat but if i if i do m which you've
seen me cover this in how to scream videos in a different way this polite way to m
but we're we're lightening the polite way to clear our throat m and we're using it with this word
but we're going to stutter it
and we'll do it really really quietly and then we're going to lean into the m
we're going to feel the resonance in our face of that closed m
we're doing a couple things here we are very tenderly closing our vocal cords together we're
not slamming them together with lots of volume but we're also introducing airflow instantly so
this is what's known as a hard onset but we're doing a low volume low impact hard onset m
and we're sensing engagement above our vocal cords almost like stage whisper right our
vocal cords are down here uh m m we're cutting the air off and then we're letting it go m m
m we should feel that sensation of things dropping a bit what we're doing here is we're
reminding ourselves that a lot of what we feel in terms of maybe overuse in our vocal tract
has nothing well not nothing but it has not everything to do with our actual vocal cords you
see our vocal cords have no pain receptors in them if you're feeling pain or you're feeling rawness
or uh a sense that you've overused your voice likely what you're feeling are the
tissues around your vocal cords that have been inflamed a little bit from all of that air and
all that stuff going on yes your vocal cords can swell
and yes a couple different indicators that they've been that they are swelling are that you have a
little bit of extra phlegm uh also that you are a little hoarse because they're not closing as well
yes you can overuse your vocal cords and get those symptoms but a lot of times those
symptoms are accompanied by the more scary sensations of like oh wow my voice really
feels raw plus i'm a little hoarse and i've got phlegm i've really messed something up
the pain or discomfort that you're feeling is likely from muscle tension and is likely
from too much air and engagement of other parts of your vocal tract not a vocal hemorrhage or
massive damage done to your vocal cords by doing this m we remind ourselves of the
different points of engagement that are present in our vocal tract yeah we if you sing rock music
you engage your upper throat quite a bit if you're doing it correctly
if you sing rock music you blow a lot of air through your vocal cords so you can be hoarse
but we're reminding ourselves here e-m-e-m and then we're closing
our vocal cords and we're going oh my vocal cords are closing okay it's not like i'm doing this
moving it around if you can close your chords
and make a decent sound even if you're a little bit hoarse your vocal cords are fine
it takes a lot a lot a lot a lot and a lot of repetitive stress on your actual vocal cords
to cause permanent or long-lasting damage most vocal injuries are repetitive stress injuries not
i sang a little too hard for one night and now i'm screwed i'm not a doctor and i didn't see
what you did last night to your vocal chords but i can tell you that this little tiny exercise
mentally it re-centers me up i'm okay i overdid it a little bit i can still close my chords i can
still feel the difference and when i do this yep that is where it feels a little bit raw
em okay take a break rest up a few days get back at it in a way that doesn't overdo the best thing
that you can do for your voice especially after you have gone a little too far is to
reacquaint yourself with quiet sensations quiet points of engagement and reassure yourself that
your voice still works it's over you overdid it a little bit but it's okay oftentimes when we don't
react this way when we zip our voice and then we do that for a few days and we get into this
fear-based mindset of like oh i really screwed something up we wake up the next morning things
still feel raw what we don't realize is that the tissues surrounding our vocal cords and the muscle
tension that we've created by being stressed and by overdoing it that can take days sometimes
weeks sometimes months even to go away if our mind is focused on oh i really messed something up ah
if we can relax if we can do this simple exercise em and take special inventory
of where we feel the overdoneness the vast majority of the time the tension will subside
because you're not anxious the tissues will become less raw and heal and you'll be well on your way
i in my past have gotten to the point where i feel like i've overdone my vocal cord my my vocals
quite a bit and i've gone in and i've gotten my throat scoped and i'm like oh my my voice
is feeling raw constantly and i have this tension in my neck and i feel like i've really screwed up
my voice and every single time the ent he throws the scope down there and goes now your vocal cords
are great the areas around it are a bit raw from acid reflux or overdoing it but your vocal cords
are fine and he says the same things that i'm saying to you now i have worked with hundreds of
vocalists who have had that same conversation with me or had that same conversation with their doctor
where yeah they've overdone it but mentally because they don't
know what they're feeling and they don't they're not aware of what is actual damage and what is not
they get in this downward spiral of convincing themselves that they've
really messed up their voice i'm not trying to minimize real vocal injury
so please don't take this that way what i'm really trying to say is that injuring your
voice takes a lot permanent or long-term injuries if you're in tune with your voice like we talk
about on this channel and you overdo it and you have some rawness you have some raspiness
you you most likely haven't done anything now what if you're clearing your throat and you're like oh
now that that doesn't feel like where my voice is messed up it feels like it's lower like the
bad clearing your throat that i demonstrated earlier well you know from this exercise then
how to structure and focus your engagement moving forward as you work back from recovery
you always want to feel throat engagement whether you're doing aggressive singing
or whether you're just holding back a little bit of air using compression you always want
to feel that above your vocal cords a vast majority of the time we burn out our voice
quicker and we feel more discomfort when we are engaging areas below our larynx
that causes rawness and a lot more discomfort than em
than that so this exercise this simple exercise awakens proper placement of holding back air which
we absolutely need because whether you know it or not you're always singing with a little bit of
that that little bit of that compression you can do it the right way or the wrong way see a lot of
other videos i've done on this channel to dial in compression but this exercise is helping you know
where to place that point of engagement for long-lasting singing do this exercise
reacquaint yourself with the points of engagement do it quietly do it often
do it when you get up in the morning after the the next several days and remind yourself that
yeah that place may feel a little raw
and i can still close my chords i still have constant speech ah constant closure
you're okay then after you've reacquainted yourself drink lots of water get lots of rest
do some of the other things i've talked about on this channel like rangefield dynamics speaking
as you recover so that you're not talking the same area of your voice all the time that will
speed up recovery as well as keep you mentally stable as your body heals we'll see you for more