Let's start with imaginary optimal conditions. A couple of months before recording, a singer goes into strict training. They give up all smoke, alcohol and drugs (including anti-depressants and tranquilizers), dairy products, caffeine and sugar. They attend regular yoga classes and start working with a vocal therapist (as opposed to a coach) to learn to stretch, flex and develop the muscle groups that can tense up and interfere with vocal production. They avoid all situations where they are exposed to second-hand cigarette smoke.
This rarely happens.
Singers often come into a session with some half- baked notion that they should give up drugs, cigarettes and alcohol but they fail to realize that timing is crucial when it comes to this. The same two folds of tissue that you use to sing are used to cough mucous out of your system. Mucous is one of the main ways that your body deals with anything it perceives as toxin. It creates mucous and you cough it up. It tends to collect on your vocal folds during this process. Try playing guitar with mittens and you'll get a rough idea of how this can hamper you. Coughing slams the folds together and causes them to swell. Swollen folds are unpredictable and can cause problems with pitch power and resonance.
Quit means quit.
A lot of the people I work with are a bit hazy on this. The body often does a fairly decent job in the short run of assimilating substances that are bad for it. You won't start purging until your body gets a very clear signal that you are not going to ingest that particular substance anymore. A person who cuts down from a pack of cigarettes a day to several cigarettes a day is not likely to start coughing up the tar that lines their lungs and their vocal folds.
A recreational drug user who decides to give up cigarettes, heroin and pizza two or three weeks before an important recording session is quite likely to sound their worst. It's nearly impossible to accurately time when a person is going to get rid of mucous when they quit ingesting things, so let's break this down by substance. The first part of this article will focus on what an individual singer can do to get in shape for a recording session. The second part will focus on last minute tips for engineers when singers inevitably fail to get it together. Purging is the last thing you want to have happen during a vocal session.
Cigarettes
Nicotine is the most addictive substance known to man. The failure rate for people trying to quit is 95 percent a year. People often say that they love to smoke but I find this ridiculous. People love not having nicotine fits and are usually embarrassed to admit that they are in helpless thrall to a substance foisted upon them by evil corporations. Most hardcore smokers started as teenagers, a time of life when hormonal changes and a sense of immortality leaves them particularly vulnerable. If you are a social smoker with a habit of less than a pack a day for less than ten years then your prognosis for long-term abstinence is good. People giving up cigarettes with the help of a vocal therapist, acupuncturist and a nutritionist can often purge the tar within three to six weeks. Once again, quit means quit. If you're still smoking an occasional cigarette it's likely that your body will continue to assimilate the toxin rather than releasing it. Hardcore smokers are likely to have problems beyond purging tar from the folds and should try to quit at least six to eight weeks before a recording session. Nicotine withdrawal will cause anxiety and edginess that will impair a vocal performance. Acupuncture and massage will greatly reduce these negative effects. Before you start bitching about the cost of acupuncture or massage, think about how expensive cancer is and think about all the money you'll save by not smoking. You can probably afford a couple of acupuncture sessions a month with the money you save by not buying cigarettes. Unless you're experienced with having bodywork done, never, and I do mean never, have acupuncture or massage done the day of a vocal session. The release of toxins can make you feel dizzy, nauseous and or weak. I also don't recommend the patch for singers, as it will prolong the period before you purge and a busy singer wants to get this out of the way ASAP. Wellbutrin is effective but it can be very dehydrating and several singers I know said this made them feel crazy. It's best to just tough it out if you can.
Marijuana
One joint is worth about 20 cigarettes when it comes to your throat. Ever notice how quickly your pipe gets clogged? Pot smokers tend to have weak, strained- sounding vocals and a lot of pitch problems. It can take up to six months to recover from daily pot smoking that's gone on for years.
Alcohol
Alcohol causes severe dehydration. The dehydrating effects of alcohol take about four to eight hours to kick in and the rehydrating effects of room temperature spring water take three to five hours to kick in, so do the math. Drinking the night before singing can have a more negative effect than drinking during a session. There are a lot of well-mannered, high functioning alcoholics out there. Giving up your daily six-pack the day of a vocal session is a bad idea.
Heroin, cocaine, ketamine
Toxic chemicals ingested through the nasal passages end up where?
Anti-depressants
This one is tricky. I, for one, am never going to be the one to tell someone not to take this stuff, but I think they are widely overused and over-prescribed. They tend to very dehydrating and results vary widely. I've seen singers on Paxil who sound like angels and singers on Prozac with such intense dry mouth that it hurt to listen to them speak, let alone sing. At one point in Boston I had so many students on psychopharms that I called the voice clinic at Beth Israel to ask their opinion of them. Here it is: If a singer is so clinically depressed that they can't do the breath work necessary to inflate their diaphragm, then the use of these drugs can be considered appropriate. If they are being prescribed these drugs for something like a bad breakup the resulting loss of tonal quality could easily depress them further. That said, if a singer decides to stop taking these it certainly needs to be done with medical supervision.
Caffeine
Caffeine is very dehydrating and can cause stomach acid to hit the vocal folds. Vocal folds that have been bathed in stomach acid will not function very well for the next 24 hours or so. In addition, caffeine causes muscle groups to tense resulting in a tight whiny sound. To kick caffeine only takes about three days. Don't take aspirin for the resultant headache, as it often contains caffeine and aspirin can cause vocal hemorrhage. I've seen remarkable results in singers who give up coffee, and their skin often takes on a brighter color.
Sugar
Sugar really irritates the throat and tends to kill your bottom resonance. It will also cause muscle groups to tighten and it makes you more susceptible to infection. Kicking sugar can generally be done within a week. You might experience some fatigue and irritability.
Dairy products
I truly believe dairy is evil. It's meant for cows, not people. We're the only animals that drink another animal's milk. Cows have a much more hardcore digestion system than we do; they have three stomachs, for starters, and often eat nails rocks and all kinds of other crap when they're out grazing in the grass. Dairy products have been linked to all kinds of diseases and are a perfect conduit for pesticides, antibiotics and chemicals. Eating dairy and singing is roughly equivalent to melting cheese all over the fret board of your guitar and then trying to play. If guitars only came covered with melted cheese, musical people would still learn how to make music with them. Offer them a guitar without cheese, however, and they would never look back. It can take about four to eight weeks to eradicate dairy from your system, but I've also seen it happen much quicker. Giving up dairy the day of, or a few days before, singing is one of the most common mistakes I see singers make, as they'll be coughing it up in front of a mic. Singers who eat dairy often can feel the lump of phlegm that collects at the vocal folds, but it's also very common for dairy products to cause weak, unpredictable sound. Mucous can cause the muscles in the throat to tighten severely, hampering power and resonance.
Aspirin
