Case Study #2: The Yeller
Lewis’s Story
Names and details have been changed to honour my clients’ privacy.
Lewis began singing when he was in highschool. He loved rock and sang in a garage band with his friends for years. They would cover Soundgarden and Nirvana and they wrote their own songs in a punk/grunge style.
As his love of music blossomed, so did his voice. He learned that the higher he sang, the louder his voice got. It sounded awesome. It was powerful and expressive. He sang on stage, but didn’t practice much and never took lessons. It was about the message of the music. It was about rock and mother-f-ing roll.
He found that his voice got a little sore after singing, but didn’t think much of it at the time. Singing was his outlet and he honed his songwriting skills and was able to communicate his feelings and experiences in an incredibly bad-ass way.
Time passed and Lewis left singing by the wayside for several years. He continued to sing every so often with his friends at a jam or at a karaoke party. Each time he sang he felt that rush of catharsis he felt back in the day.
He decided to take music back up again. He convinced his friends to get the band back together and they booked a series of shows. After a few months of singing every other weekend and practicing often with his band, Lewis found that he was losing his voice every few weeks. This was a crushing blow for Lewis, who had just reinvigorated his love of singing. It felt like a defeat and he was very hard on himself. He blamed himself for the shows his band had to miss on account of his voice loss.
This is when I met Lewis.
He, unfortunately, did do damage to his voice. He had developed small polyps on his vocal folds. I referred him to an ENT to help him before we could begin our work together. He had been using the chest voice with an excessive amount of strain his entire life and that had taken its toll.
Lewis came back to me after several weeks of vocal rest. He was dedicated to learning what it meant to sing in a healthy way to avoid vocal damage in the future.
We did an initial voice assessment. I could hear the strain in the first set of warm-ups that we did. As we moved higher through his chest voice range, his chin lifted, his face scrunched up, I could see the muscles in his neck bulging out as he strained to hit a D4. I could also see the disappointment and embarrassment in his face when he cracked or went flat as a result of strain.
His anxiety over his perceived inability to hit the higher pitches in his range got the best of him sometimes. He would get angry and yell at himself. This anxiety would sometimes snowball to the point where we would have to cut the lesson short because he was incapable – in those moments – of producing sound without strain. His shoulders lifted, his back tightened and his face scrunched up and he could not consciously get out of this posture without walking away from the situation.
Additionally, Lewis had no real desire to sing in the head voice. The style that he sings in demands a chest voice balance. He wasn’t incredibly interested in using the mixed voice either, again, because it wasn’t stylistically aligned with his musical taste. We decided to amend his bad habit of unnecessary strain and build new goals around creating healthier habits in the chest voice. We agreed to limit the ranges of the songs he chose to sing so he was never singing beyond (or even close to) the top of his chest voice range. (Though I secretly planned to convince him to balance his registers down the line) His long-term goal was to sing in a way that would not result in him losing his voice.
Lewis’s Singular Objective Vocal Practice:
We designed a vocal practice to address the most harmful habit he carried which was consistent and habitual strain in the chest voice. We decided to forgo the usual progression of building balance from both the chest AND head voices, and focus on the chest voice.
Unlike Courtney (Case Study #1) Lewis didn’t dream of a bigger range, just a healthier one. So we carried on with this one, singular productive goal: to ensure that the chest voice was supported, relaxed (emphasis on relaxed) and clear.
This process took months, coming close to a full year. Lewis’s worst habit – worse even than strain – was that he was unkind to himself.
When we did an exercise that ascended through his chest voice range, he consistently followed up with harsh self-criticism afterward. He would say things like “I know I fucked up that top note on the last few rounds”, or “I missed every single one!”.
Listening to him during these moments was heartbreaking. Because to me, I heard the notes that he didn’t strain. I heard the effort that was going into his practice. I heard strain that was not a result of poor technique, but a result or the anxiety that he carried around ascending through his range.
He created a self-fulfilling prophecy. By believing that he would strain, he caused himself to strain. His self-doubt (verging on self-hatred) caused a kind of anxiety that physically tightened his body, blocked support and limited his ability to focus on the techniques we were learning.
Training out the strain in the chest voice was the productive goal, but the real work was in changing his idea about what success meant. He had to learn to celebrate the small victories, like good support in the low end of his range. He had to learn to celebrate the notes that didn’t strain as opposed to regretting the ones that did. This was the real hard work.
It took a while, but eventually, Lewis could sing up to D4 without strain.
These days Lewis is still singing with his band. He doesn’t lose his voice anymore from strain and his voice is generally healthy and well taken care of. His range is slightly limited in that he dislikes singing in the head voice and therefore hasn’t developed a mix, but he is happy, and at the end of the day, that’s what matters! I have a secret plan to slowly coax him into a head voice practice eventually, but ultimately, it’s his choice.
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