Ace voice wizard Karen Sussman at ProVoiceCare.net says you can reduce the effects of stress on the vocal mechanism, even if you can’t entirely de-stress the rest of your life! Circumlaryngeal massage can be used to help warm up the voice before use, to restore voice quality after use, and to reduce vocal symptoms like tension or strain. Very cool! Click HERE to see the video. This was featured in Money Notes Notebook, October 2019. To subscribe to this fabulous once-a-month

New students sometimes ask me to label their voices. They want me to tell them if they’re an alto or soprano, for instance. Being someone who teaches microphone-based genres, I’m reluctant to do that, for reasons I’ll explain. But sometimes somebody wants a singer to write down “what [they] are,” so it’s good to have a safe answer. The terms alto, soprano, bass, and tenor are choral designations, and even in the setting of your choir or acapella group you may become a diff

A fellow voice teacher and I were talking about a quandary that all teachers of the arts face: whether or not to encourage students to pursue their art. It’s a tough one. A few weeks ago, I posted a blog about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, an effect whereby we are very confident that we’re very good at things we know little about. The arts depend on the Dunning-Kruger Effect. If newbie artists really knew: how really hard it is to be successful in the arts how little they really

This may not always be the reason, but it explains a lot. May, 2017 Turns out American Idol is coming back to TV this year. Also, I’m music-directing a show and saw a lot of auditions. Both of these remind me of a discussion I'm pretty sure you’ve had. You know... the one about singers who are terrible and don’t seem to know it. Historically, I’ve taken a pass on that subject. It just seems too mean. I don’t like to laugh at anybody who’s trying, because at least they’re tr