The Kinds of Singing Pain That Signals Trouble Ahead

We are about halfway through the summer and I just completed a long road trip. Did you notice that everyone in the world seems to be doing construction during the holiday? Everything is closed down from three lanes to one and you have those great cones directing you and thousands of other vehicles, including the huge semi- trucks into one tiny lane for, I don’t know, three States. That was pretty much what my two day drive there and back was like. Sometimes when I’m passing through the cone zones, I will count how many times people have smashed into cones because secretly I want to run through them and go to the open lane where no one is clearly working. But the truth is that the cones are there for our protection. Let’s say there is legitimately construction up ahead, if you hit one cone it’s like, “Whoop, I better get in my lane.” Hit two cones and you’re like, “Yeah we are getting off the right track here”. Hit three cones, “Disaster Ahead”. Not to mention that fines double in construction zones.

Well that’s what different kinds of pain and discomfort are for your voice. There like warning cones. You feel pain one time when you sing and it should peak your interest like, “Huh why do I feel that pain?” Feel that pain again, ‘Huh, I really need to get some help for this.” Feel that pain again, “Disaster Ahead! Get Help now.”

Pain, Discomfort and What it Really Means

First of all, not all singers that have problems with their voice say, “I have pain when I sing.” Sometimes they will say, “It’s more like soreness in my throat when I sing or sometimes after I sing. Sometimes it just feels like my voice is really exhausted and tired.” Have you ever felt the “scratchy voice” and you feel like you have a catch in your throat afterwards? Sometimes it gets to the level of hoarseness or loss of voice, usually this is the day after. You get up the next morning after you have been singing and you sound like you have laryngitis. Sometimes it just really hurts to talk so you decide you better not talk and it’s probably a good idea. But many times its just plain pain. Your throat hurts. Your voice hurts, during singing, after singing, sometimes two or three days after singing. Too many cones my friend. So why does it hurt to sing. Well to answer that we have to answer a more important question, does it feel that way when you talk?

Why it Hurts

    It all goes back to the way the voice works. Your vocal cords live inside a little box called the Larynx. If you were to run your finger down your chin, down your throat, you would feel a little bump. Guys it’s really easy for you, it’s your Adams apple. Girls ours is tucked away in there a little bit, you can feel it if you run your finger down there. If you put your finger on it you will want to move it side to side, if you put your hand on it you can feel the vibration when you talk. That’s because your Larynx is the Chamber of your Chords. Making sound doesn’t have so much to do with the Larynx, because the Larynx is more of the house for the vocal cords, but it has to do with the vocal cords closing and resisting the air flow coming from your lungs. It’s kind of like barn doors closing. They will close and a big wind storm will come and go “Whooooooooooo!” That’s a simplistic way of explaining how it makes sound. The wind comes up, the barn doors, or the vocal cords, close against them and resist the air flow, a little bit of air gets through “Whoooooo!”  If the barn doors are too open they go “woo”.

Your Voice Already Knows What to Do

To make different pitches, the vocal cords zip up like a zipper. It’s kind of like a rubber band. Have you ever made your own DIY guitar with rubber bands? The big fat ones that are loose are low sounding and the really tiny ones and you pull tight are very high sounding, it’s the same thing. Your cords actually get really thick at the bottom when they’re open, and then they zip up and they thin out like pulling a rubber band at the top. So there’s zipping up and zipping down and thinning out at the top and getting  thick at the bottom all while resisting the air.
How do they do that? Well there are several groups of muscles that work together kind of like a finely tuned engine, shifting gears.  They are handing off and deciding who needs to close which part and who’s in control of thinning out the cords. So all of these muscles are working together to make the vocal cords zip up and down and come together to do what they need to do. When all those muscles do what they are supposed to do seamlessly, it’s like a sports car shifting gears.

That happens in speech. That’s why when you’re talking to your friend’s you don’t go “Oh my goodness I just really couldn’t possibly speak that loud about anything” and you also don’t say, “Oh my goodness, I could never speak that high because I just don’t think that I have those notes in me.” You don’t even think about it you just do it. Why do you do it? Because the muscles know what to do, they trade off, they shift and they get the cords zipping up and thinning out and doing what they need to do to resist the air flow and bang there you go. You are a conversationalist. No training needed. Your voice just does it naturally.

So Why Isn’t It Doing It?

What is getting in the way of that just doing what it does when you sing and causing you pain? Have you ever felt yourself reaching for a note? Sometime you feel like you have to scream to get it and then you feel like you’re tired after that. A lot of times we aim at a note because we don’t think we can reach it and we are just taking a stab on how to get to it. Sometimes we have heard other people sing something and we say “I want to sound like that” so we copy what we do and it results in this forced kind of feeling when we are aiming for those high notes.

Copying may even get you to the note that you are heading to but here is the problem with it. When you aim for a note that way, what happens in your body is that it’s engaging the swallowing muscles. The Larynx, the house that your vocal cords are in, yanks up. When that happens it sets a whole chain of events in motion that are like a whole mile of cones.

The Proof

Try something here for a minute. Say ABC. Now swallow. Now do them both at the same time. Doesn’t work does it?
It doesn’t work because what happens when the Larynx goes up is it closes the epiglottis. There is this little flap that goes between the food pipe and the wind pipe, it’s there to protect you from basically shooting food down your wind pipe and choking yourself to death. It just works automatically, as soon as the Larynx goes up the body says, “Oh it’s time to close the wind pipe.”

The problem with that is your vocal cords are in the wind pipe that’s how you’re trying to get your sound out. So while you are trying to get that note out there your Larynx is going up and its choking off the windpipe and it’s trying to shut it. That’s why you feel that strain, that’s why you feel that pain, and that’s why it can cause vocal damage.

You have a fight going on inside. Another name for yanking the larynx up, which closes the windpipe, which causes all sorts of problems, is pulling chest voice. Basically because “Chest Voice” is the name given to the very very bottom of the notes in your register, speaking or otherwise, they reverberate most in the chest, so that’s why we call it chest voice.  It’s the very bottom notes. So when you pull up or yank your chest voice way beyond where it’s supposed to go in speech, the larynx goes up, the epiglottis tries to close and you’re in a battle for your life, or at least your note.

How to Reach Notes without Discomfort

We have identified what’s going wrong, that’s causing you the pain, so how do we fix it?  Somewhere along the line you have learned to yank up your chest voice to aim at notes. So, basically, you have to unlearn the bad habit that is pulling your chest voice and you have to learn to sing the way you speak.  A key to that is that you have to remind your voice what it feels like to have your larynx down to be really at a speech level.

Along with getting our larynx to relax, which it does automatically in speech, we need to learn to let the muscles shift and work together like that finely tuned sports car in singing. When it does that in speech it’s called mixing. It mixes a little bit of chest voice and a little bit of head voice, which is the name for the top part of your register. Everything in between has to be a mixture of those two and when that happens no pain, all gain. The answer is always the mix.

Alright you’re saying, “Sign me up teach me that, give me a couple of exercises and I’ll get that sucker down and we’ll be just fine.” Well think about how long it took you to learn to sing the way that you do. It could have been months but more than likely it’s been years, maybe decades. The truth is once you have learned a habit of totally not mixing in singing. 

It takes a trained instructor that understands the mix to definitively get you there.  A good instructor will help you from creating new bad habits that can cause damage while you get a feel for what mixing in the singing voice feels like. 

How Long Will This Take?

So how long would it take you to learn to mix, keep your larynx down, not yank those notes, and not to have pain when you sing? I have to be honest; it just depends on the quality of your instructor, how bad your non-mixing habits are and how willing you are to do the work it takes and to learn how to sing the way that you speak.

But there are two things that you can start doing today to start heading the right way. [SEE AUDIO FOR QUICK START TIP]

Get Started

If you are looking for some professional help for your voice we do provide one on one online lessons via Skype at The Voice Club.  If you just want to find a qualified instructor in your own area I’m happy to refer you to someone who really knows their stuff. 

If you have a singing question that you want answered by a pro, email me at Podcast@TheVoiceClub.com .  I’d love to hear from you!

Ready to take your voice to the next level? Check out online training at The Voice Club Academy