A Quote by Gary Catona

Singing is a kind of sport and a singer a kind of athlete and following this model becoming "vocally fit" - building vocal muscles - should be the point of any form of voice teaching. Other approaches don't work directly on building vocal muscles but instead focus on so-called diaphragm support and breathing, mask singing, breath control, throat relaxation - all of which are useless at best and harmful at worst.
I've been diagnosed with what's called vocal tension dysphonia. The muscles around my vocal chords kind of constrict my vocal chords from doing what they should do. It's kinda like being a body builder and you have muscles that are so large that they don't allow you to have flexibility, if that makes sense.
Well, any time I'm preparing for a performance or even a rehearsal, it's as if in a way, like any other athletes, these are muscles that support the vocal cords which are just I believe cartilage. It demands a kind of constant warming up and a constant feeling of where is the voice today.
Well, any time Im preparing for a performance or even a rehearsal, its as if in a way, like any other athletes, these are muscles that support the vocal cords which are just I believe cartilage. It demands a kind of constant warming up and a constant feeling of where is the voice today.
And singing is a physical thing - your vocal cords are these muscles.
When I first started singing - before 'Treat Me Like Fire' when I was working with a vocal coach - I realized that I wasn't even breathing when I was singing.
The activity of both sets of muscles, the diaphragm and the abdominal muscles, varies reciprocally. Thus, during inspiration the tonus of the diaphragm increases while that of the abdominal muscles decreases, and vice-versa during expiration. Hence there exists between these two muscle groups a floating equilibrium constantly shifting in both directions.
The one thing I find about singers in the business is that they often don't get the right education. I hear a lot of them singing and when they get to 30, 40 years old they wont be able to sing because they are not properly trained. A lot of people singing from their throat instead of singing from their diaphragm.
'In My Hands,' the title track, is my very first vocal attempt, and I'm not a singer as such. But I've always wanted to express myself vocally on my albums, and I don't really have much of a capability for singing. The strength is in, I think, the lyrics and just speaking. It just comes from inside.
I went to drama school in England, and you spend your first year working on the muscles surrounding the vocal mechanisms. You learn how you support it and create characters through your voice so that became an obsession. So I went to Hollywood thinking, 'Oh, I'm going to be one of the great voice-over artists.'
I think I'm a vocal genius, not a musical genius. I like background vocals. I consider myself a voice, not a singer. A voice is a sound, and singing is what you do with that sound.
I started singing about three years ago, I entered a local singing competition called Stratford Idol. The other people in the competition had been taking singing lessons and had vocal coaches. I wasn't taking it too seriously at the time, I would just sing around the house. I was only 12 and I got second place.
It [my vocal] didn't sound like what I wanted to hear; the vibrato isn't what I liked anymore. So I got myself to an ear, nose and throat guy who does a lot of work with singers, and I was hoping there was a big wart on my vocal cords or something and they could scrape it off and I could have the voice I wanted. But he said, "No, for 71, that's your voice."
I've always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that's where I got most of my training. So singing on stage, you just inevitably, when you're around other vocal artists, you get better at singing.
I'm not a singer. If you've heard any of my records, that's not singing. I have no vocal qualities whatsoever. I've got a lot of enthusisam and I go to the cross, but there's no skill going on there. It's more just intuitiveness.
The vocal chords are like most other muscles that need to be worked out.
When you're singing, you're using extra muscles, and it requires a lot of exercise and breathing. You can't do that if you're a sissy. If I have any fitness advice for people, I'd tell them to sing more. It's good therapy, too.
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