hey chris liepe here with tips for singers recovering from kovid i have recently had
kovid and i still have a lingering cough very persistent tends to go up and down with
my mood my amount of sleep or my activity level in fact i struggled through a recording
session for a video i was making when i was at the height of really really coughing a lot
it was this one it turned out okay but man watching it in light of knowing how much
i was trying to battle this cough might give you a little more insight
i've heard lots of stories from close friends and family members to acquaintances on the
internet horror stories of people's journey from you know this extreme case of kovid
to you know having these long-standing massively horrible symptoms
that are that linger and linger and linger i can't speak to to any of the symptoms that i did not
experience and my most heartfelt and sincere sympathy to anybody who has struggled greater
than i have i i got a medium case i would say but i didn't have to go to the hospital i didn't
have to go on a ventilator nevertheless it really affected my voice and continues to affect my voice
and i've gotten quite a few questions from you guys on the channel you know if you've had kovid
when is it okay to sing again what are some exercises i can do to coax my voice back from
this horrible sickness so i'm going to share with you in this video three things
three of the things that i've done with my own voice to work with my persistent cough
to coax my voice back into the the feel and the sensations that i'm used to experiencing
because that i think was a big thing for me that my voice continues to feel differently than it did
before and some of the things that i did before covid i'm not as comfortable doing now so there's
certain exercises and certain things that i've done to coax my voice back into that and then
finally a good way to warm up and come to terms with where your voice is for the day this is great
if whether you've had covet or not but i found it especially useful coming out of this covid
season if you like this unconventional approach to singing and discovering different things about
your voice and you'd like to work with me on a deeper level the best place to start is by
clicking the link below and joining my free voice course there's lots of ways that we can work from
there but get the foundations down let me walk you and another student through breath support through
resonance through discovering what your range can can do and then we can go further from there
the first thing i did and continue to do every single day in light of this cough in light of
feeling just chronically a bit hoarse and off is i work with onsets and i create mild rhythmic low
impact low volume uh exercises out of the onset idea so i do i start with just stuff like this ah
voice closing off the air uh uh uh and then letting a little bit of air through and then
cutting it off uh uh uh going around in different parts of my range
absolutely work with head residents and chest residents start in your chest residence here
and then just really come to terms with how well how clean those onsets are are you doing this
is there even though you're trying is there air that is happening before the note
particularly in head voice maybe in chess voice too versus
like can you can you not help but put a little h in there oftentimes this is going to reveal
if there's a little bit of swelling or if there's mucus creating lack of coordination
in your primary cords and it's good to test this before you start singing because this is going to
help you understand how far you can push your voice by push that's probably the wrong word
uh how far you can how much you can engage and how intensely you can engage your voice
if you go through this and after a little bit of of warming up with this you can't do or
if it sounds more like this huh
which is how my voice sounded and felt
for weeks uh even you know in the midst of covet for sure but even after i you know when i was
testing negative and everything man it was it was frustrating and i knew if if i can't even create
a healthy abrupt onset in different parts without a lot of airflow going on
i knew i needed to be careful because there may be some swelling there may be excess
fluid mucus things getting in the way that are going to allow me to perpetuate healthy muscle
memory development which is what singing is so once i once i do that with the onsets
and i've gently coaxed my voice into being able to do them without the accidental h
i do a little bit of rhythmic exercises with it and it might just be something like this
ah
it's a little silly but it allows me to get into a groove to loosen up
and it's so low impact i am playing rhythmically with my voice i am going around with my range but
i am not allowing an excess of air through so if they're this is the best thing to do when you are
coming off of a season where your voice has been really taxed by something other than singing like
coughing a ton or being wheezy or dryness or lots of mucus or whatever so doing this kind of thing
playing with your chest resonance playing with your head resonance going around to different
vowels getting into it a little bit you're coming to terms with where your voice is in
the very first part of using these onsets and then you're allowing yourself to engage your voice in
a rhythmic and more musical way without blowing too much air past your chords
okay the next thing that i have done very religiously is a reverse siren over the word spew
so normal siren you'd think of as is ascending
and then coming back down here i call it reverse maybe it's just half of his iron
it descent the descending part of the siren and we start with
the idea is that we want to start with
we're moving air and we're encountering resistance somewhere else other than our primary chords our
primary chord engagement with s and the s we're using sibilance to start the phrase this in many
ways is easier on our vocal chords and then we're going to enter into our head voice on an e sp
but what we're going to do is we're going to start by placing that e spee
kind of like you're imitating a muppet sp sp and we're gonna move that resonance speed
so it goes from e kind of a pinched off nasal e sweet and then we're opening it up we're creating
a very forward sort of ball of resonance in the front of our face just feel it in your mask
and we're giving it quite a bit up in our head voice once we start to
get louder with our voice after we've come to terms with our voice it's best to start
doing that in head voice especially when we're crawling out of us out of an illness
the last thing we want to do is really go full on in our chest voice
because that requires more air that requires more strain on our vocal cords
so i'm opening that speech
and then as i descend into my chest voice i'm trying to i don't want to do this
i want to i want to smooth that break out
as i get to my chest voice i want to be quieter and quieter so the loudness the
energy comes after exploding from the sp i'm not really i'm exploiting the p but i'm i'm
i'm a little bit pinched off and then i'm practicing opening up we want to we want
to practice that mindset too because if we don't know we're pinched off
we will always be pinched off and won't be able to really perpetuate an open sounding voice
especially after having to relearn how our voice feels so we want to start intentionally pinched
and then create that contrast within the warm-up as we descend
then the last part we want to descend into pure fry loose vocal cord engagement
and just live there for a while experience the vibration
loose vocal fry is very good for your voice it kind of dusts them off a little bit it
it's like giving them a little bit of a massage it's low impact low airflow
all right here's the last thing that i do i've continued to do since covid when i get
into coughing fits and my cough tends to go you know i'll be fine for a while and then
and then i'll really start coughing and if i'm trying to sing while i'm struggling with
this cough i actually start to lean into the cough so if i'm you know if i'm going to cough
and i've been fighting a cough reflex during this video during the filming of this video some of
the camera splits that you see are because i've reset because i've coughed during the next phrase
but if i've got this cough and i'm i'm i'm fighting against it i can actually use
this cough to awaken the sensation of how my support should feel
hey
what i'm doing is i'm allowing myself to cough and i'm entering a note while focusing my attention on
my poop muscles more on that in my free course you've heard me talk about poop muscles before
if you have joined my free course and i've touched on it here and there in other videos
we're using what is a weakness in order to dial in a sensation that we need to be familiar with
what i've done is i've trained myself to be able to exit from a cough
into a healthy belted note now notice we warmed up onsets healthy onsets first before we did this why
because this that is a really exaggerated soft onset or h right that right there
can be really hard on your voice because you're blowing a lot of air past your chords
and then you're going ba and you're putting them together
you're cr you're combining elements of soft onset which is ha ha with heart onset
lots of air slamming those vocal cords together so we want to make sure we're good and warmed
up and we've come to terms with being able to do healthy mild hard onsets earlier and then
so there's the exercise practice going into a belted supported note
what this has done for me and you saw a little bit of it during the uh the little snippet i
had at the beginning of this video what this has done for me is it has helped reawaken
the ability to confidently push with from my support i am not
uh initially out of out of covid i was afraid to push my voice because it was it was difficult for
me to feel okay well it's healthy push but it doesn't feel right up here if i'm going
now i gotta use my breath up a lot but i i am if i'm able to awaken the sensation of proper support
balance in other words i can get helpfully behind my voice and belt even in the midst of a cough
i am less afraid of what the coughing will do to my voice and therefore i don't cough as much
don't ask me why there's so many mental games that uh we have to play with our voices and you've seen
me do other things like that on the channel like trick yourself into singing higher or um you know
cluck like a chicken to relieve temp tension we're basically playing mind games with us and a lot of
perpetual coughing is involuntary um spasms or nerve reactions that don't really need to be there
and so if we can convince our mind that it's kind of okay if it happens
and then we can use it to our advantage our body starts stops working against itself
and we're able to work with the ailment this works it's worked for me it's worked for other private
students that i have helped coax through this same thing one of the main questions that i've gotten
even in light of these exercises is when when can i start singing again unfortunately i can't
answer that for you because i don't understand the unique nature of your illness i don't understand
what state your voice is in even if you say well i'm a little hoarse i'm a little raspy
when is it possible for me to start but i can't help you answer this question when you are able to
talk throughout the day in a mild sort of normal for you way even in the midst of coughing when
you're able to phonate on a speech level without your voice feeling taxed or out
of sorts then you should start trying to ease back into some of these exercises and singing
not before if you're feeling hoarse if you're feeling raspy and you try to go into this
if you fail that first test or that first exercise you know it's not time
so that's one of the reasons that i introduced that first exercise first
that was one of the things that i did to t you know okay well i've talked today how's my cord
closure how's my how's potential swelling do i feel okay use that first exercise as a gauge
that'll help you answer when it's okay to resume and then from there it's a matter of feeling out
your new definition of vocal budgeting make sure that you're not pushing yourself too
hard make sure that you're listening to your body and doing things that not are
based on what you used to be able to do before you got sick but coming to terms
with where you're at now that will help you get to ba get back to where you were more quickly