My name is Yvonne Ambrée. I’m a singer and vocal coach. originally from Berlin, Germany. Beautiful Berlin. I’m currently living  in the US in Brooklyn. I still travel a lot back and forth, uh, because I’m a, a vocal coach on the, German version of the Voice that TV show.
I did a lot of other TV stuff in the last couple years, as a vocal coach. I did a lot of private vocal coaching for a lot of, big names, mostly in Germany, some in the US as well. I work as a singer, as a studio singer. I recently recorded, one of the lead vocals for the last Walt Disney movie Encanto and I did a lot of backing vocals for, a lot of, a lot of pop singers.
but today we’re gonna talk about the voice and the do’s and don’ts of a healthy singing voice, which I think is  really underestimated because I think a lot of people just, uh, start thinking about it when they get, have problems with their voice, to be really honest.
I think a lot of people don’t really care too much about it. I, I hear it all the time. I work with so many singers, especially on the show, on the Voice, and I’ve been doing it for the last 12 years. So I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of singers, and every time I ask them, do you warm up? And they’re like, oh, no, I never warm up. not all of them, but a lot of them say that, and it’s not necessarily, just bad.
but of course it’s always better if you warm up. But I Â don’t wanna jump ahead too much. I’m gonna start from the beginning and I have a little slideshow that I wanna share with you.
let’s start Protect your voice, do’s and don’ts of keeping a healthy singing voice. I’m gonna start with a little introduction. I did that already about myself. then what is your voice or my voice? where, how does it even happen? The whole thing. I’m gonna get into the anatomy of it just for a second. I don’t wanna get too crazy about it, but I think it’s important to know.
then the second thing, what causes voice problems? how does it even happen? How do you get problems with your voice, with your singing voice or speaking voice as a matter of fact. then the third one, do’s and don’ts. And the last one, I’m gonna dive into a little bit of vocal warmups. it’s, this is not a masterclass on vocal warmups. I’m not gonna go too deep into that. but I think, uh, it’d be nice just to, you know, share a couple of ideas and, give you a couple of examples, what, you know, what could be a nice vocal warmup for you.
And then the last thing will be a q and a. and, yeah, I’m looking forward to all of that. So let’s get started. so what is your voice? So the sound of your voice is, is produced by vibration, obviously. and the vocal folds are the ones that vibrate. So it’s kind of like, it’s two bands of smooth muscle tissue and they’re positioned positive each other, in the larynx, which also is called the voice box.
Maybe you’ve heard that before. and a good example is sometimes in class when I have students, I always just take, a hair tie like this. And that’s kind of like, I try to explain it with that. ’cause that’s kind of like a nice visual. Okay. so, Â and what happens when you sing it?
Basically, you know, your, your vocal folds are just vibrating. So when you sing higher, you know, there’s more tension. You know, your vocal force is just gonna do that.  And then when you sing lower or like in your chest voice, loose voice, relaxed voice, speaking voice, they’re just  easily vibrating. so, so that’s basically what happens when you sing. and the ln is located between the base of your tongue and the top of the traia, which is the passageway to the lungs.
I have another little visual, which I think is really nice.  okay.  and I’m going to share that with you really quick. so you can see it’s,  it’s a little more anatomy, but I think it’s really important for you to see. let me  stop sharing that for a second  and then share something else with you.
It’s a lot of maneuvering here.  Okay. I hope everybody can see that. that’s obviously a skull. And, it’s a really nice little app here, complete anatomy. And, I’m just gonna  show you  where the vocal cords are exactly, and how tiny and how fragile they are.
So vocal cords are muscle tissue. And if, Â if you, if there’s one important thing that you can take from this masterclass is that your whole vocal box is a bunch of muscles and muscle tissue that is moving and stretching. So please don’t forget about that because people never really know what it is. And, it’s muscles, you know, contracting and releasing, it’s muscles like everywhere else in your body. Â So if you take a look at this, so that’s your respiratory system here.
If I take this off, it’s just gonna be the skull you can see. And here’s,  that’s your vocal box, all of that. It’s a bunch of muscles. I’m just gonna add the Sper respiratory system back to it.  And I’m gonna take it off again. And if we go deeper into here, I know this looks kind of crazy, these are Evo folds  on this side.
And here  on the other side, let me see if I can actually  just take  this off.  This looks even more creepy, but here you can see, if I just gonna twist this,  this is  all  your vocal box, all of this, a lot of muscles just working together. Let me put all of this back in  and let me just  remove the muscles for a second.
And then just,  there it is, your larynx again. Now you can, you cannot see the vocal cords ’cause they’re in here, but if I take it off again, this is a skull, but if I add the muscles,  here we go. Lemme see.  Here they are. And  I’m just showing you this, I’m gonna stop this here. I’m just showing you this  because your vocal chords are so tiny and fragile,  and people forget about that.
Sometimes people, I ask people like, what do you think? How, how big are, how small your vocal cards are? And people are like, well, maybe this or maybe this. And I’m like, well, they’re like, maybe this, you know, super, depending on how tall or short you are. O Â obviously it depends on, you know, your body, your whole anatomy of your body. But, they’re tiny. So if something happens to them, it takes, it takes time to heal if, if, it even heals all the way back to normal.
so let’s just go back to the presentation, and  move on with this here. I have another photo here, which is a little easier to see. I just showed you that already. so there’s the view from above. So basically here on the right, if you would look straight into my mouth, you see, here are the vocal cords vibrating. And  then, you know, if it’s a side,  they’re here.
So tiny, Â let’s move on to the next one. Â So what causes voice problems? Actually, Â before I do that, I’m sorry, I didn’t wanna show you that slide yet. I wanted to go into something else. I wanted to show you a really, really crazy example of, damaged vocals and damaged vocal chords.
I wanna show you a really, really crazy example of damaged vocal chords. There’s a lot of singers who’ve had it. A lot of singers had surgery over the last years, from Adele, Justin Timberlake, so many, I’m sure you know, a couple.
and they all had these problems. but one of the biggest, I would say artists that in the last years whose voice drastically changed as Miley Cyrus. And I just wanted to show you a  an example of her voice when she was very young, or like in her early twenties or, late teens when she did all the Hannah Montana stuff. Not that I’m a fan, but it’s like, it’s a really drastic example. And then to how her voice sounds today. And like a super short interview, because that’s kind of, it happens, it happens so much.
so let me  show you all of that.  So that’s Miley Cyrus in 2008 doing the Hannah Montana. It’s just a short interview in her voice. Maybe you see, you hear  her Is so different from the Hannah interest to the Miley interest because you get to see Hannah come down onto the stage and you get to see Miley rise up. ’cause I’m underneath the stage and I come up in my jacket, says Miley on the back
Well, you heard her talking voice and her singing voice if you wanna get into it, it’s pretty similar. And, this is an interview from last year, 2020. Just listen to her voice. Do You get intimidated when you working with an Elton John? Music is where I can hide. Like, you know, music is where I feel the most secure.
That’s why my voice holds a lot of value to myself and to other people. And, I’ve had to kind of work on my relationship with that and find other things that I love about myself too. Because, you know, you look at other athletes or their whole careers are built on these big muscles, you know, and it’s like, I’ve got these two little tiny chords
So I’m  gonna stop you if you’re interested. You can watch the whole video. I think it’s pretty crazy hearing her voice from in 2008 and then 12 years later, obviously she’s more grown up, but she lost,  I would say like a fourth,  or at least the major third, just in her speaking voice, which is, which is crazy. uh, and she had, surgery, and she’s talking about that in that interview as well.
But, I think she never really cared too much about it before. And  now, you know, that’s, that’s her voice, how it is right now. There’s not much that she can do. I think she’s taking a lot of care of it, but it’s a totally different voice than what she had before, because she was not using her voice in a, in the right way. And, she’s saying a thing in the beginning here that, you know, comparing it to an athlete.
And that’s a pretty accurate, description  of a singer to be really honest, because you are using your muscles and that’s your instrument and that, you know, you might make money with that. And, you gotta take care of it. You know, if you, if you, if you’d be an athlete and you, you know, and  you make money with that, I don’t think, you know, if you preparing for the Olympic games that you’re gonna go party every night.
But when you’re a singer and you’re a rockstar, you do that,  or at least  some do it. I never do that. I’m gonna stop  this share and go back to my presentation. and now I’m gonna, we can look into what causes voice problems. So the don’ts,  the do’s and don’ts, of your singing and speaking voice. So the first one is aging. And aging is a, is a pretty obvious one because  it’s a muscle, like I said.
And  you know, you get older and your muscles grow weaker. That’s just how it is. If you practice, obviously they will stay healthy, longer and fit. you know, if you run every day, your body’s more fit than if you just sit on the couch every day. That’s just a fact. it’s nothing crazy about that idea. but obviously the older you get, you know, the harder it is to keep up, with, with the voice that you maybe once had and you will lose some high, register.
And, uh, you know, that’s just, that’s just life. You just gotta live with that, as easy as that. the second one is alcohol use. which is, again, Â very, very, very straightforward. There’s nothing, I mean, alcohol is just not good for your body. So again, if you’d be an athlete, you probably wouldn’t drink every night before, going to a big game or doing something.
So it’s the same thing. And I’m not talking about the glass of wine that you have at night, but I’m talking about extensive alcohol abuse. It’s just not good for your body, so it’s not good for your vocal cords. next one is allergies. I know people who, who had, who got like serious vocal problems just because they always had allergies and they were always coughing and, you know, it was always like, uh, their throat was always kind of blocked. And, you know, they’re coughing so much that it actually, affected the vocal cords.
I I, I heard that a lot of times. So, if you have allergies, try to find a way, you know, keep it, Â you, I mean, there’s medicine for that, which is not always the best ’cause it dries out the vocal cords as well. But if you have allergies, if you can take a break from singing during those times and don’t cough as much, try to keep, try to keep it lu lubricated as much as you can. so the fourth one, is illnesses such as colds, upper respir, respiratory infections, similar thing also obviously throat cancer.
all of these things, will cause voice problems as well. another one is psychological stress. again, Â it’s your instrument. You have it in your body. and if you don’t feel good, Â if there’s no, you know, if, if you feel low or you have depression or you can hear that in your voice.
so  think about that. Like, I,  I have a lot, I had a lot of students who, who would just come into my room sometimes and they would start singing and I would like, what is wrong?  You just, you just hear it. it’s, it’s just a fact. So, count that in. You know, it’s not an instrument that you can just put in a bag and, you know,  put away, it’s in your body. So obviously if you feel good, your voice will most likely sound better than when you don’t feel good.
another one is screaming, and that’s a really, really big one. because screaming a lot of times there’s nothing good about screaming in general, but we hurt ourselves when we scream, especially when we do it a lot. So, especially, or talking loud in big rooms, I’m sure you’ve, you’ve, you’ve had that before when you were like at a party or somewhere and you had to talk loud, super loud all night, and then in evening your voice was just like, strained or tired.
That’s exactly what it was. Screaming, it’s just even louder. So, what Miley Cyrus is saying in her interview as well is like, one of the things  that, you know, she would always, she would talk so much during the day and I think she was drinking a lot as well, smoking a lot of cigarettes. So, you know, you sing for two hours every night and then afterwards, you know, you don’t do anything to keep your voice healthy. You  kind of do the opposite, you know, you scream, you talk even more, you work your voice, you drink, you smoke, so, and everything excessively.
so obviously that’s not gonna be good for your main instrument. so, and again, I talked about smoking already, that’s the next one. and here, I’m just gonna, a lot of people ask me that, is smoking really that bad? Or even on the show sometimes I have, uh, I have singers who’s like, I stopped smoking this week just for the show. Â And I’m like, I don’t, that doesn’t even really help.
because when you, when you stop, if you’re a heavy smoker and you wanna stop smoking, your voice will not sound good for a while after that, for like two to three to four weeks even. It’s just because your body’s, you know, moving differently and is, you know, it’s, it’s addictive. So, your body just has to cope with that. And it takes a while. And a lot of times when you stop smoking from one day to the other, you know, the couple days after that, your voice will rather sound a little foggy.
So, if you wanna stop smoking, I would, if you can suggest do it step by step. but again,  there’s a lot of, uh, there’s a lot of  famous singers, a lot of classical singers even who are heavy smokers. And I always say, when people ask me that, I always say, I don’t think smoking is good. Obviously smoking is not good. but I think it’s even worse if you have no technique, if you sing with no technique, I think that’s even worse.
I think you can hurt your voice more than by smoking. And a good example are all these classical singers, ’cause they, they know what they’re doing, they’re smoking, which, you know, doesn’t make it better. But I know a lot of pop singers who have serious vocal problems and they never smoked in their lives. It’s just because they don’t, don’t have any technique.  So, just that into consideration that I’m not advocating smoking, not at all. But, if I’d rather work on the technique, that’s like  my main, my main point here.
then throat dehydration, same thing as I said in the beginning. Also with, allergies and, and illnesses. Keep your throat and the whole vocal box lubricated, like that’s really important. Drinking, drinking water is important. I’m not talking about like coke or anything sugary, but you know, just water. certain kind of teas are really good. Not all teas are good for singing. Ginger tea is really good.
uh, peppermint is okay. some people like it, some people don’t. but a lot of herbal teas I would not suggest, to be honest, because they dry out as well. herbs, a lot of herbs dry out, so I would rather take ginger tea or maybe lemon tea. sometimes just hot water and honey is really nice too. or just regular water totally works as well. and there’s an article here, voice misuse or overuse.
If you wanna read. Very interesting link from the John Hopkins. throat code tea
