I started to experience a lot of pain when I would sing, my voice would get tired easily, then I began to get croaky after singing, soon after I was experiencing it during singing, and eventually I started to lose my voice all together. I noticed a few of my singer friends suffered from the same issues, something that wasn’t ever flagged up as an issue at the time by our lecturers or singing teachers, it was just shrugged off as something we needed to deal with. But I knew that wasn’t right, and I knew that if I wanted to continue my career in music, I needed to do something about my vocal health problems.

I had been having singing lessons for years at this point, but it was only then I started to realise how important vocal safety was to singers and their careers as vocalists.

I began researching into vocal health, vocal recovery, and various vocal methodologies to help build and develop voices, anything to help me get my voice back on track.

I decided it was time to get serious about my technique and at the time, there was very little choice in local singing teachers, most were session singers who taught on the side, who were more performance coaches rather than technique teachers (some of whom actually suffered themselves with vocal damage) and in the end the only singing or voice teacher I could find which could help me with vocal technique was an Opera Teacher (even though it wasn’t my chosen style – I was led to believe at that time, classical technique was best and I believed that techniques that enabled singers to sing above orchestra’s and out into large audiences without damaging voices could be a good place to start!) This teacher helped me rebuild my voice, she helped me to find a more balanced approach to “support” and “placement”, but it wasn’t enough to sustain the contemporary styles I actually performed in, and so I had to keep looking for something to help me maintain singing in the styles I loved.

I ended up going down the vocal health rabbit hole. My interest in learning about vocal health and the vocal mechanism was growing, I wanted to be able to give more as a singing teacher, to always be able to offer solutions and advice to any vocal issue that may arise in my students, I continued studying, attending regular vocal health conferences, including those run by The British Voice Association and The Association of Teachers of Singing which led me to begin experimenting in various different vocal methods including (amongst others) the accent method, and the ground breaking Estill method which completely changed my approach to voice and training, I had not realised there was such an in depth and scientific approach to vocal training, I was so excited – so much so I began travelling from Portsmouth to London to the Royal Academy and South Kensington every month or so to attend specialised courses and training in this advanced method. Soon after I began branching out into other methodologies, studying with vocal rehabilitation coaches, speech therapists and doctors, with an aim to absorb as much information and learn as many different approaches to vocal health and recovery support.

The combination of methodologies as well as developing my own approach over the years gave me the knowledge and drive to provide my students with an understanding of the vocal mechanism, its capabilities and how to ensure that a singer can build a strong and powerful voice that will last for a career and not just one set!

With a unique focus on vocal health and supporting vocal injuries in singers, I established myself as one of only a few singing teaching teachers to offer support in vocal health and recovery in contemporary and commercial music in the UK. Over the past 16 years I have been privileged to be able to support singers world wide in rebuilding and maintaining their voices.