Protect Your Voice & Your Throat Nodes

Video Transcript

"Hey! I am Mark Black and welcome to expertvillage.com. We are going to be talking about vocal performance. Practicing, getting nodes on your throat is an another issue. We don’t want them and a node is just a callus on your throat on your vocal cords. You get calluses from it irritating something and not stopping. Basically if you stop irritating the thing, whether it is your skin or a place where you write, you get a callus on your finger. If you stop doing that, the callus will go away. Same thing with nodes generally speaking and my point is just this. When you practice or you sing, you do a gig or you go to a choir concert, you sing, you come back the next day and you talk like this. Okay that is kind of expected. You know “I blew my voice out and I sing like a mad man for three hours.” If your voice is… now you should not do that. Okay you don’t misunderstand me. The way we want you to exercise and work your voice to and to manage your voice as a professional, your job will be to manage your voice so that it is always ready for you and not blew it out talk before that. So that’s not the goal, but what I am getting at is how to kind of monitor if you are endangering your voice. Basically you are going to stretch your voice out from time to time. If your voice is cracking the next day, then you overdid it and you need to backup a little bit. But it does take a long time to hurt your voice and so just trying to make a statement about calluses and nodes and it is just to say you need to take care of your voice. If it has been three days since you had a gig or something and you are still talking like that and you are not sick, then you need to be very careful and if that persists any length of time, you should go to a doctor and have him check your throat. And in general, nodes being a callus in the throat you need to manage that realize you are going to stretch your throat from time to time. If it goes away in a day, then that’s understandable and you are fine and but then in the future you need to practice and try to get past that. "