Tips to Keep Your Voice Healthy

By Leanne Pearson

I’m sure you’ve heard the advice: “get 8 hours of sleep, rest your voice when you can and drink plenty of water”. What else can we do to make sure our voices are in tip top shape as a singer? After all, our voice is our instrument.

We have rituals, and things we do to keep our instruments in good shape. We always tune our guitar before we play, we change the strings etc. Why shouldn’t we do the same with our precious voice?

If we break our guitar, we can go out and buy a new one. If we “break” our voice, we can’t buy a new one at the store.

Despite years of long, late-night shows in smoky bars and hours upon hours in the studio, my voice thankfully remains in healthy condition.

Here are my top 4 tips:

1. Throat Spray

Using a throat spray when you feel a bit raspy or sore, can help soothe your throat! I like Singers Saving Grace by HERBS ETC available on Amazon. I use it every night before bed! Don’t drink water after applying this, allow it to sit on your throat as long as you can!

2. Throat Coat Tea

This is my secret weapon and has been for years! This can soothe a sore throat instantly and help with endurance when you have shows or are singing in the studio for extended periods of time! “Traditional Medicinals Organic Throat Coat Tea” can be purchased at many local stores or online!

3. Humming or Lip Trills

Throughout the day I am constantly holding a hum or doing lip trills. These techniques are for warming up your voice. Whenever my voice feels tired or raspy, I give it a little warm up! It’s like stretching or doing a warmup before you work out. You have less chance of injury if you do a proper warm up, stretch and cool down. It’s the same concept with our voices.

There are videos online of how to do these exercises! Basically, you hold a “hum” with your lips gently closed for as long as you can. Take a big breath, choose a low note, and hold that as still as you can. Then switch octaves and do the same with a high note. Experiment with a big breath, a little breath, using vibrato, not using vibrato etc.

Lip trills are very similar except you are blowing the air out and forcing your lips to vibrate, almost like you are imitating a horse! Do a few scales while moving your lips. Start with a low note and slide your way up to a high note, then reverse and go back down. Experiment with going as high as you can, and as low as you can.

4. Stretch or massage your neck muscles.

Less tension means singing with more ease! Any stretch that feels good to you will be good

Leanne Pearson is a Canadian country rocker and songwriter

Website: www.leannepearson.ca/