How to Protect Your Vocal Chords While Singing

The voice is like any other part of the body. It needs to be taken care of and not over or underworked if you're training it for singing. The type of music style you choose varies in how much it strains the voice. For example, death growls take a lot of effort and must be done in a special way as to not blow out your voice box (more on that in later articles). Operatic singing involves constant vibrato an belting, and popular singing involves bending notes and holding notes. No matter what kind of singing you do, it's important to properly warm up and not overstrain.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• drinking water (optional, but recommended)

1. A good warm up for increasing range is singing scales. "Doe, a Deer" is a good one because it gently forces you to go up and down the scales. Try moving the song up one octave when your ready and down an octave.

2. When you start singing, you shouldn't (usually) be gasping for air. Make sure you aren't forcing too much air out when you sing and try to breath naturally and slowly when you sing. Not only will this help you sing without turning blue in the face, but controlling the amount of air expelled gives you more control of your voice pitch, vibrato, and volume.

3. Drink water. Your larynx (voice box) is located directly below your tonsils and singing can dry it out. You need to lubricate your voice before, during, and after you sing. It doesn't matter whether the water is warm or not, but many people find that warm water eases a soar throat better.

4. Try humming songs. It sounds useless, but humming is actually good voice training since it forces you to vibrate deeper within your larynx/lungs. In general, you should always try to sing from the bottom of your lungs rather than your throat (unless you're in falsetto).

Tips & Warnings

• Take breaks from singing. Don't overdo it! I can't stress that enough. I actually damaged my voice trying to sing too much in too little time, and I still haven't fully recovered two years later!
• Sing what you like to sing! That's a given, but sometimes people sing only to impress others. Sing because you like to.

Resources

• FAQs on Vocal Damage

[jull14]

on 6/19/2009 Excellent article and wonderful tips to help many these days, thanks for sharing