Ashaala Shanae is an expert vocal health coach with over 20 years of professional experience providing voice care, voice confidence building, vocal instruction and instructor certification for various industries. In addition, Shanae is also an international singer, TEDx speaker, digital course creator, author, creative entrepreneurship mentor and philanthropist.
How did your career start?
I started out as a professional touring background singer, and my first gig ever was with an artist that was newly signed. As a result of that, it meant touring, and I also was a substitute teacher. When I became a teacher, I ended up having vocal damage called vocal nodules that came on my vocal cords.
I went to the ear, nose and throat doctor and told them I haven’t been able to speak or sing in the past six weeks. I went through two months and had no voice and went into a deep state of depression. And I said, “Listen, I have the opportunity to tour on the road, I have an opportunity to launch my professional career in this industry. What do I do?” I have a background in music education, as well as music business. I took that and I started finding holistic ways to heal myself and heal my voice, holistically through diet and nutrition practices, proper health practices, and proper vocal utilization practices.
As I started healing and my voice started coming back, I did not tell the label what was going on with me because I did not want to lose that coin. But the word started getting around that I knew the blueprint of how to really heal voices. So I started to work with the artists I was on the road with and then the word started to spread amongst the singers. The next thing you know, I had all these people coming to me asking for vocal advice.
What can someone do to heal their voice?
I’ll give you a prime example. I had a young lady that came into my office. She was dealing with severe hoarseness, [which] is what we call dysphonia, that’s the medical term for hoarseness. She was dealing with muscle tension dysphonia, which is hoarseness or loss of voice, due to the fact that she was dealing with a lot of tension and stress. Come to find out she was dealing internally with a lot of anger, rage and bitterness. It was literally keeping her body tense all the time. We had to do things like something called SOVT exercises, right, which are a fancy word to say semi-occluded vocal tract exercises, which is a diagnosis that we would give or a practice that we would give to people to learn to relax the voice. Everything is not done by medication.
