emergency vocal training

The stuff I've read on this indicates that you should do lots of warmup before singing, all of it super easy. E.g., intoning notes as low as you can go, very quietly, gradually building up to scales or whatever, but keeping it always very doable.

Drink more water.

Also practicing on a sucky PA and straining your voice is only going to make things worse. Maybe you could turn your guitars down?

fill up your belly with air when you sing, take breaths more often, DRINK WATER, drop your jaw, enunciate vowels more clearly

lipsynch.

i know exactly what you mean, and actually, i'm losin' my voice right now too. for one, uptown churl's advise is what i got from my pro singer friends--second, rest is def good, as in, don't try harder to belt when you start losing your voice, third, honey and tea, and fourth, suckily, i'm worried i might be developing nodes on my cords, so if it doesn't get better, go see an ENT maybe. UGH. Good luck on your release!!!!!!!!!!!

hi dere surprisingly silent on this one.

i know right?

i hope he's okay

maybe you should ask on itr

I only just saw this!

The suggestions offered so far are good ones. I recommend doing some research on breath support and vocal placement as well; there's a lot of stuff one could go into with all of that that is really too much to go into in a messageboard post.

http://www.vocalist.org.uk/vocal_techniques.html

This site leans heavily towards classical music but the concepts can be and are applied to vocalists of all genres (I once caught some clips of a voice teacher coaching some kids on how to do the death metal growl that, if you can find them, are amazing).

I always read about vocalists drinking water with added lemon juice just before shows for added stamina. Maybe give that a shot before a practice and see if it does anything for you. And if it doesn't, no harm done, and you just drank some tasty lemony water.

this is going well. what seemed to help the most was bringing headphones to plug in the PA so i could actually hear what i was singing and not have to bellow the whole time. it was weird playing with headphones but it did help. trying to work on breathing right too, it's hard on a couple of songs that are really wordy with no good place to take a deep breath. practice on saturday, i lost my voice but not til the very end, after we had played our whole set plus ran through a few songs extra times. practice on sunday, did not lose my voice at all

I have done the headphones thing before. Seems to work best with Sennheiser head-vice type cans.

also make sure you're like standing up straight. i can get so contorted in the heat of the moment and then i realize that i'm like looking down with my head and bening back at my waist or some such nonsense

just try to relax; if you're straining and adding volume to hit high notes, you're singing 'wrong' (of course much of your favorite rock vocals are 'wrong')

Lots of good advice here that's missing the key element: GET A HIGHER-POWERED PA.

As a voxist I really can't emphasize this enough. I lived with a shitty one for a long time and really had no idea how many large and small accommodations I was making. It'll really be like night and day.

i think our pa is probably ok, we're just using shitty speakers (old kustom pa speakers). what i really need to do is buy some decent floor monitors, so i can get used to the usual stage conditions

Yeah, good monitors are essential.

One thing you should look for are some catch breath exercises. There's one that is very hard to describe but is very effective for getting your breathing mechanism working correctly:

Pick a major scale where the low and high octave notes are comfortably within your range (let's say the octave from low C to middle C). Starting on the low C, sing this pattern where each note/breath gets the same duration ('#' indicates a breath) except the last note, which is held for three beats:

C-D-#-D-C-#-C-D-#-D-C-#-C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D-C-B-A-G-F-E-D-C

The tempo should be quick (say, 132 on a mteronome) so that the breaths aren't very long and you should breath as deeply and quickly as you can through your nose. The first part with the breathing should feel like a waltz where you are using less breath to sing the C and D than you are breathing in, so by the time you get to the long scale, you have a full tank of air and can make it up and down the entire scale on one breath. The idea behind it is to get you to used to the sensation of taking in a lot of air really quickly, so that your catch breaths in longer phrases can really give you a decent amount of air and that you can do them without completely disengaging from the way you're singing.

what to do with a singer who blows her voice out every gig and can't play two nights in a row? she wants to be pro, but what's she going to do if she ever goes on tour?

tell her to pull back a little, that sounds really unhealthy.

agreed, but that's how she sings (loud and louder). i wonder if she would take some voice lessons.

Maybe she can't hear herself on stage? Get her turned up in her monitor. Can you afford to spring for in-ear monitors?

10 minutes of warmup before each gig, singing scales and different sounds (gagaga gugugu gigigi ninini nununu mimimi etc), get a better mic (sennheiser e835 has a lot more oomph without feedback than many shures and other mics for the same price) and/or better pa, avoid dairy, avoid cold drinks near showtimes as they make the throat close up (tea with no milk, and maybe some honey in it is awesome, bring a thermos!), headphones for practice sessions and tell the guitarist to TURN DOWN ALREADY!

make sure to keep your mouth open wide. I can't say how many times I've started singing only to realize that half the volume is getting eaten by my jaw. Stand up straight, especially for harder parts, you dont want to lose volume from fighting just to expand your stomach because you are leaning to the side. Make sure you are breathing enough times, so you arent fighting the ends of phrases because that puts tons of strain on the vocal chords. Keep your chin up, so you arent closing the vocal passages and doing the same thing. The trick is to keep the path of air as open as possible so you arent fighting yourself. Straight back, straight neck, open mouth. Add a belly full of air and you're golden.

tell the guitarist to TURN DOWN ALREADY!

lol