How I Learned To See Problems As Symptoms To Find The Cause.

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Singing as a kid was easy. I loved it. My mom loved it. We had a blast together.

When I was around 10 I started singing more challenging songs so I faced a bunch of problems like running out of air, straining the vocal cords, flat/pitchy sound, cracking of the voice, hoarseness, ⁠low volume, rhythmic problems, and more.⁠ 😒⁠

I thought “singing is hard”. I asked myself why all those things were happening and the only answer that I could find was “I need to train harder, I need to put in hard work because my voice is not trained”. So I did, for hours and hours every day for years and years. I chose random songs that I liked and tried to imitate the sound, pushing through the pain and barriers that I found in my voice. I kept abusing myself — my voice. It was the norm in my life.

When I got to my bridge I thought “alright, that seems like a barrier, let´s break it down to sing higher notes…if Mariah can do it, so can I!” Filled with optimism and enthusiasm I started straining, misusing my head voice, squeezing my natural tone into something that it was not — I wanted to sound like her and in my blind obsession I believed that I have achieved it. That is because I always sang with her and primarily heard HER voice and not mine. This was the time before Youtube and Karaoke came along - easily accessible through the internet. I never recorded myself in the first years and so I never understood the reaction of my parents and siblings who always told me “stop screaming, shut up, you sound horrible!”

Years later when I had the money I started to record myself and I understood them reaaaaally well! I sounded nothing like Mariah. I didn´t even sound like myself. I felt ashamed. I stopped singing for a while because I didn´t know how to sing like myself. I didn´t even know who I was for that matter.

If only I knew all the things that I know now about the voice and how I could have found my own unique and natural voice really quickly AND easily…

All the vocal problems I was experiencing were merely symptoms and never the cause. So I could have never “fixed” them with training harder or singing more. Cause singing more caused more problems.

More is never better.

Less is always better if the quality is right and handpicked for the needs of my current level and voice type.

Speaking of voice type…I didn´t even know about it for many years until I came into my school choir. Unfortunately, my choir teacher put me into Soprano just because I could hit those notes and my pitch was good by that time — yeah I did find a solution to that. But I was not a Soprano.

So straining and hoarseness became a much bigger problem after a while and I did not even suspect it was because I was singing in the wrong voice type.

I secretly wanted to sing in the Alto section but never dared to question my teachers' choice or to let down my fellow Sopranos. After all, my own mom made me sing for years very high songs because my voice was really high when I was little. So two people couldn´t be wrong, right?

I endured my position trying to please my teacher and my mom and everyone else around me — except my own voice. Until I came into puberty and the breaking of my voice — yes that does happen with girls, too. I didn´t know that of course at that time. I was clueless.

As the problems grew with time I decided to keep searching for the cause of them. I needed to find the root cause of it all AND I needed to find the solutions to all the problems before I damaged my voice completely…

Stay tuned for the next story tomorrow of how I searched for the cause…✨

Much LOVE + SUCCESS ⁠💕⁠

⁠ *eR ;)⁠

E L L A R A Y ⁠

soundstonez⁠

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