Voice Care Tips –
Protect Your Singing Voice and
Enhance Vocal Health!
When it comes to singing, most of us do not really observe good voice care measures on a daily basis. In fact, we would not give a second thought to eating certain foods or taking alcohol or caffeinated drinks just before we sing!
In fact, there are many important voice care tips that we can learn, so that we can maintain a healthy and strong singing voice, as well as not do too much damage to our fragile vocals!
These tips range from which foods we can or should eat for a good singing voice, as well as which foods we should avoid in order to take proper care of our voices. There are also various voice protection tips and techniques that we can follow in order to ensure proper vocal health. Check out the corresponding links to find out more about how to exercise proper voice care!
Many of us would probably know some of the general guidelines that we can follow to take care of our voice:
1. Maintain Good Posture and Proper Breathing Control When Singing
– Always make sure that we maintain an upright and neutral posture and practise proper breath support when we sing! Practise these basic breathing exercises in order to establish better breath control in our singing. If we wish to, there are also other more advanced breathing exercises that we can practise in order to be more proficient in our breathing control!
2. Practise Vocal Warmups Before We Sing
– We should always be sure to warm up our voices before we start to sing, so that our diaphragm and our vocal cords are ready to support and produce the sound that we require during singing. Check out some useful vocal warmup exercises in order to achieve better voice care and protect our singing voice.
3. Regular Exercise and Proper Diet
– This point applies to our voice care and also to our bodies in general. Achieving a good level of personal health is certainly beneficial to maintaining a great singing voice. This is because when our bodies fall ill, we may feel fatigue, experience blocked noses, sore throats or may not even practise proper vocal technique when singing. This will cause unnecessary damage to our voices, and we would do well to keep ourselves healthy so that our voices will be healthy too!
4. Keep Our Neck, Jaw and Face Relaxed During Singing
– When we sing, we control our breath using our diaphragm and the surrounding abdominal and intercostal muscles, and our voices with our vocal cords and supporting muscles. We should always take care not to involve other muscle groups into the picture, for example our neck muscles, jaw muscles and facial muscles. These muscles should be relaxed when we sing, as they will affect our voice by increasing the amount of tension in our throats and in our vocal cords, and making it more difficult for us to sing well!
Understand more about some common singing problems by clicking on this link, and you will know how to overcome these problems with some simple tips as well as constant effort on our part!
5. Placing or Focussing Our Voice Appropriately
– There are a great variety of vocal registers and positions that we can sing from, and knowing which register to use as well as which position our voice should resonate from will be beneficial to general voice care and avoiding vocal damage. For example, we would not wish to place a very high note in too low a position, or to use a low register to stretch and reach for a high note! Do check out the rest of this website for more information on vocal registers as well as positions!
6. Reduce Speaking Time in Noisy Environments
– When we are in extremely noisy environments, for example at a busy construction site or at a crowded club or pub, we would find that the overall noise level in these places are far higher than what we usually encounter in our daily lives. As such, when we try to speak in these noisy conditions, we cause a lot of strain on our voices and may hurt our vocal cords in the process. Reducing our speaking time in these noisy environments will help to avoid unnecessary damage and aid in protecting our singing voice!
There are also some specific guidelines regarding usage of medications that we would do best to bear in mind:
1. Avoid anti-histamines, decongestants and anti-depressants. These tend to cause dryness in our voice and make it difficult for us to sing well, as our vocal cords need to be well hydrated and moist in order to function properly.
2. Avoid over-the-counter local anaesthetic medication for the throat. These tend to reduce nerve sensitivity in our throat and also create numbness, making our voice more susceptible to damage. In a sense, it is something like driving when we are blindfolded, as we are unable to feel our voice or our throat sensations and we do not know if we abuse our voices or employ too much of our throat muscles to sing!
3. Take antacids for acid reflux. Acid reflux causes acidic fluids to flow back up towards our throat and may hurt our throat tissue as well as our vocal cords! Learning to take care of our acid reflux problem will certainly help to keep our voices healthy and free from damage!
These are just some tips on proper voice care that we can follow in order to maintain a strong and healthy singing voice!
Certainly, for us to sing better, we not only need to know how to protect our voice, we also need to understand the various common singing problems or habits that we may have, as well as how to avoid them! Click on the link to understand more about our singing problems and try to identify your personal singing problem, as well as how you can correct your bad singing habits!
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