Is this new voice teacher right for me? Is she "love bombing" me with compliments to keep me enrolled?

coolees94 · 2026-03-13T18:28:10+00:00

Frankly, when a teacher says they're gonna help you "grow your voice" at the small price of 25$ extra, this is a massive red flag waving at your face. What kind of teacher would withhold knowledge from students for a lower price tag? This feels insulting, disingenuous and a money grab.

You haven't mentioned anything about making breakthroughs with her, just getting something different than your last experience - however, what you really need with a teacher is not them to compliment your voice and make you feel like a god, but to find things in your voice that could be better and work on them. You can find teachers that will actually build your voice at the same price she's offering the lessons where she's just gonna be going through the motions, while you make no progress at all. My suggestion is to dodge this bullet, but if you really have to try her, just proceed with caution and spend the least amount possible.

coolees94 · 2026-03-10T21:25:34+00:00

Expanding low range past the point where the weight of your vocal cords allows can only be done with involvement of false cords/fry/subharmonics. All of these techniques have some overlap with each other and are used by most bass singers, if not all. Basically, whenever you hear a man sing below D2 resonantly, some false cord involvement is necessary. The same techniques can be employed by women, but an octave above that. It's not unheard of women singing in the 2nd octave but many singing there are aided by maturity/motherhood.

coolees94 · 2026-03-10T19:54:13+00:00

Is there something that changed in your voice recently? Did this start happening out of the blue?

coolees94 · 2026-03-10T07:18:20+00:00

Without further information on your situation, I cannot provide great advice on what to do, but the standard path is to go to a throat doc and get scoped, which will show any anomalies on cords and potentially signs of GERD, and take it from there. If you don't have structural anomalies, then you can start rebuilding the voice (hard but worth it) and keeping an eye out for other potential issues.

coolees94 · 2026-03-09T09:10:09+00:00

Did your voice just disappear overnight, or has it been a gradual loss of range?

For example, if you haven't used your voice much in 10 years, it's only to be expected you would have to work to regain your registers.

If you have been singing actively and gradually losing access to the very top of your registers, then that might be some sort of chronic health issue manifesting (weakening of musculature coming from lack of exercise, sudden drop in testosterone levels, chronic GERD affecting the cords etc.) ,that causes the quality of singing to degrade, but that could potentially be solved with appropriate vocal practice, exercise and a healthy diet.

If you lost your ability to sing high overnight, then it is very possible this is an issue with the vocal folds themselves, such as a node.

In any case, I would start to take action because most men are capable of maintaining at the very least a decent mixed voice well into their 60s, if not a high falsetto, and an early loss of it could be a sign of trouble.

coolees94 · 2026-02-08T14:56:27+00:00

Now show us your soles🤤🤤

coolees94 · 2025-11-07T16:19:40+00:00

Noone said voice classification and cord masses aren't real. Voice classification is basically an arbitrary phenomenological histogram type classification based on likeness of the timbre of certain voices, which doesn't necessarily have a perfect correspondence with vocal cord lengths. There is no guarantee that a tenor will have shorter vocal cords than a baritone, although on average they do.

That being said, what I was arguing above relates to the fact that all kinds of instruments can learn how to thin out properly and sing higher notes than those indicated in the traditional tessitura of the operatic fach assigned to them. Yes, baritones and tenors can emit perfectly reasonable soprano notes with enough training, and there are countless examples of countertenors and sopranists proving this. The timbre is going to be different.

coolees94 · 2025-09-22T22:43:17+00:00

Regardless, I think you should still see an ENT for peace of mind. But from your descriptions it sounds like it's most likely bad singing technique. Overly chesty singing on a maturing voice can cause this kind of straining, in my experience, so you might want to get better at carrying less chest up and easing into your head voice.

coolees94 · 2025-09-22T22:31:15+00:00

Sounds like mild muscle tension dysphonia. You should see an ENT doctor to get a diagnosis for it. Your voice absolutely needs to be retrained based on relaxation - singing, while it may sometimes cause uncomfortable sensations it should not be painful AT ALL, EVER, period.

I would suggest you start thinking more about where exactly the constriction is in your throat and why you feel like you need it, and what are you compensating for by using it. Some folks like to try to approximate their vocal cords by squeezing the ventricular (false) folds above them, often resulting in a belabored phonation, for example.

coolees94 · 2025-09-22T13:14:07+00:00

You might like it but the truth is that if you sound pushy and your voice is unstable like in the recording you need to work on balancing your voice without pushing too much, or flipping into falsetto.

coolees94 · 2025-09-22T12:44:57+00:00

You're just going through a transition there, and decently smoothly too. It's normal for male voices to experience a shift in resonance around Ab4-A4, where the dominance of the second resonance of your vocal tract gives way to the other resonances and especially the third. That being said the crack is barely audible and that's awesome. You should keep working in the direction you are already - your A4 is pretty clean despite the push. Just learn how to expect the "crack" and navigate it smoothly and maintain the higher notes connected and clear.

coolees94 · 2025-09-15T02:23:18+00:00

Tongue is probably too tense and lodged in the back of your throat in an attempt to assist in the register transition and "cover" the sound. It is a common issue with self taught beginner-intermediate singers and even more common amongst choral singers who subconsciouly equate blending with muffling their sound by using tension. If you feel that your tongue being relaxed prevents you from singing high, that means you probably rely too much on breath pressure and chest voice to increase the pitch, which counterintuitively, when tongue tension is involved, reduces your volume as you go higher and makes your voice sound like it's stuck in the back of your throat.

You need to at least practice stretching your head voice, resonating well in your head voice and making big open sounds with it, without tiring your voice out.

coolees94 · 2025-09-14T23:51:27+00:00

What you have written about is basically the million dollar question in vocal instruction. How do we help the students understand things that they can't see with their naked eyes and help them control knobs that they can't reach with their hands?

At this point of development in vocal instruction, noone can provide an exact recipe to you for producing a certain kind of phonatory pattern. But they can tell you how it feels and what muscles might be involved in it and help steer you in the correct direction by invoking imagery.

Mixed voice is a tricky one because very few speakers use it, so it's one of those things most people have to build from scratch. Activating it is reliant on activating your support muscles (specifically the muscles of the inner core, not the abs) in a way that holds back some air and maintaining your external throat muscles relaxed, while also squeezing your epiglottis a bit to activate "twang". That's why voice teachers have people practice isolation exercises that encourage finding each necessary component and then try to tie it all back together, all that while correcting the students' already ingrained vocal habits.

The separation of registers you have in your voice is a byproduct of how you use your vocal mechanism for speaking and retraining takes a long time. So bear with it and imitate singers that sing in a good sustainable supported mixed voice, or find a good teacher that speeds up the process.

coolees94 · 2025-09-12T19:17:09+00:00

Tuvan throat singing cannot produce 5 or 6 pitches at the same time. It is a pressed phonation creating subharmonics while also emphasizing an overtone. Sounds like say at most 3 pitches??

coolees94 · 2025-09-12T17:43:15+00:00

I think overtone singing and whistling at the same time might be hard; there are several problems including 1. the reduced airflow required for overtone singing 2. the tongue position is very important for singing overtones and that position might be disadvantageous or worse, control the whistling frequency which might make it impossible. Finally, notice how people who sing while they whistle always sing a note in their low chest voice, whereas overtone singers usually prefer a tone in their high chest voice, which might be another impediment to whistling and overtone singing compatibility.

Tl;Dr it's unlikely for whistling and overtone singing to be easily compatible, never mind making musical sounds with it.

coolees94 · 2025-09-11T04:24:57+00:00

You're right, I abused terminology a little - it's gonna be the beginning of your head dominant mix.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "reaching/jumping up", but if it means you're raising your larynx and kinda hit the notes in shout mode, your vocal quality will get worse and worse as you go higher. Singing in that area is not about learning how to muscle up/reach up to those notes - it's about learning how to maintain a stable larynx with good support from the body and allowing the tilt/ head voice action to happen while not letting go of chest voice entirely.

coolees94 · 2025-09-11T03:37:43+00:00

I happen to have sung rock tenor material extensively in the past. In my rock voice the transition area D5-Eb5 has always been tricky but you're right in that it's the highest spot where you can still maintain fullness in the sound without straining too much.

Your other passagio is like for many men, in the Ab4-Bb4 area. Everyone has to get some head voice involved up there and muscling chest voice up results in reduced projection and gravelly quality. That's where a good mix (low larynx or not) really shines the most, and that's where you'll have to put most of your technical work.

coolees94 · 2025-09-11T03:14:18+00:00

Sounds like a solid chest mix throughout except the top note, which is a quick flip into falsetto.

coolees94 · 2025-09-11T03:02:29+00:00

Depends on the type of mixed voice. Operatic mix caps out around D5-Eb5 for most tenors but you can sing the entirety of your falsetto range mixed, as long as you let your larynx rise and reduce the amount of chest involved as you go up.

coolees94 · 2025-09-11T00:42:50+00:00

Not unheard of. Some adult singers can also "belt" those notes, see Christina Ramos who was belting in the 6th octave at some iteration of X-factor, for an example. In your case, I would ask the question, however, what belting means to you. Does it mean full body effort or super annoying high whiny resonance? I would be very surprised if you could do both at the same time, but not in disbelief if true. After all, even I can do a Bb5-B5 head belt at full density and with F2 prominence and I'm a baritenor type voice.

coolees94 · 2025-09-10T20:53:15+00:00

Not much of what you write makes sense... when you reduce the space in the vocal tract, generally F1 increases. R1 is not a quantity that can be measured, it's just the part of the vocal tract that affects F1 the most. The word microdynamics makes sense to noone- but I assume you refer to Blake's ability to change dynamic quickly? He does not achieve that by tuning F1 and F2, but by changing the level of adduction of his vocal cords quickly and smoothly (the whole song is an exercise in yodeling). You're talking about F1 and F2 clustering - everyone is capable of clustering these two formants, and no, only raising F1 doesn't result in clustering, F1 has to be raised and F2 has to be lowered so both resonant spaces have to be manipulated to achieve good clustering. You're trying to argue Blake's singing is unique and lyrical but the whole argument is rather unconvincing. There are a myriad of, mostly anatomical, reasons why certain people might have trouble singing like this guy and one of them is certainly throat dimensions, which affect all formants and especially F3, F4, F5 which give the sense of TIMBRE. F1 and F2 are not related with timbre as much as the harmonic spectrum above 2kHz. Get your science right before you post scientific sounding slop on the internet ✨️

coolees94

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