The Vocal Coach, vocal training, singers, musicians, taking care of voice - Page Thirty-Three - Mitch's Story

This week's Guest is Mitch Seekins, the Vocal Coach!
Join us as Mitch talks about being a vocal coach, how to take care of your voice and what it takes to be a dedicated singer. 

You can find Mitch's episode here: 
Watch: https://youtu.be/nGnaQXyjOYE
Listen: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1959737/12227122
https://www.pagesofastory.com

You can follow Mitch here:
https://mitchseekinsvocalstudio.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@TheVocalCoach/videos
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Hosted by Candy Dinsmore-Bekaan
Theme music by Matthew DeMeritt

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Transcript

 Candy: So, I am here with Mitch. How are you? 

Mitch: I'm doing good. How are you? 

Candy: I'm so good. I'm so glad you're here. 

Mitch: Thanks, thanks for having me. 

Candy: Thanks for coming. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us who you are?

Mitch: Yep. I'm Mitch Seekins, the Vocal Coach. If you google my name, that's what it'll come up as. I'm a vocal teacher. That's, that's what I do. Um, I've been doing it forvever, very, very long time. I am fortunate enough to work with a, a lot of recording artists. I was a professional singer myself for a very, very long time. And, and, uh, never reached the stage that a lot of my students are at. So, I get to now live vicariously through them and, you know, go to these awesome gigs and stuff and, and help them, uh, manage their careers and that kind of thing. So, that's kind of who I am. 

Candy: And I mean, what you do is so important for singers. 

Mitch: For singers, yeah. For singers. Yes, it is. Um, I'm actually pretty well known in the Canadian music industry for, uh, repairing damaged voices. So, you know, when a record label or a management company has, uh, a vocalist, uh, that they are involved with or managing or what have you, that is having issues, my name usually comes up and then I get calls. 

I'm thrilled to be able to help people elongate their career, you know? Instead of having something short, being able to help them overcome whatever issues they're having and have an actual full, full, full career. Yeah. I mean, they think it's important, you know, so does the record company, because they've invested a lot of money and so does the management because everybody makes money off the singer, you know?

Candy: Absolutely. And what are some of the, the issues that singers come up against when it comes to their voice and how they use it? 

Mitch: Uh, well, I mean, majority of the issues usually show up during touring is a lot of it, you know, um, It's not usual for issues to pop up in the recording studio. You know, it's a controlled environment, you know, you've got days or weeks to work. Uh, you can do things over again. You can rest when you want. Um, take lunch breaks. You know, that kind of, that kind of thing. 

Usually and it is usual ‘cause I mean, of course sometimes issues do pop up in the studio, but usually though it's, it's, it's touring, uh, doing shows where, you know, uh, the vocalists are performing 45 minute, one hour, one and a half hour sets screaming their faces off. You know, it's usually, I work with a lot of rock acts, punk acts like, not exclusively of course, but they seem to gravitate towards me ‘cause they're the ones with the issues. Uh, you know, the shows are physical, a lot of energy is expended, a lot of vocal energy is expanded ‘cause it's high energy music. Uh, paired with travel, uh, and not a lot of rest. And, uh, you know, night after night after night kind of thing. That's usually when things start showing up and that's when, uh, I usually get called to help. 

Candy: You fly in with your cape? 

Mitch: Well, yeah -

Candy: Kind of!

Mitch: My internet cape, my internet cape. I'm, I'm only available online, you know, uh, and start kinda educating them and guiding 'em through how to overcome their issues. And, you know, I mean, that, that involves everything from massive vocal fatigue to vocal nodes, to hemorrhaging. Hemorrhaging is difficult to overcome, but you know, I've saved a few careers with that, which is nice. And you know, and just, just range issues. Just all kinds of issues that, you know, singers go through.

Candy: So, when did you realize that music was going to be an important part of your life? 

Mitch: Honestly, I was five. My mother played a record for me, which is amazing because I didn't grow up with electricity, but, or I grew up without electricity, I should say. My dad in the really, really urgent early stages of the farm, uh, we would spend the winters in a small, tiny town, uh, because the farm wasn't conducive for family with tiny kids. And, um, my mom over that one winter played this record for me. It was, uh, Mario Lanza singing, uh, “Drink, Drink, Drink”. Uh, from the, uh, oh, what is it? The something Prince. It's a, like an opera. The Student Prince. Or was it a movie? It may have been a movie. 

Anyway, I distinctly remember hearing that song and it starts off with this male choir. Just drink, drink, bum, bum, bum bum ba bum bum ba bum bum ba bum. And then this voice soared over top of this choir. And it was the most incredible thing I have ever heard in my life. Uh, even talking about it now I'm getting goosebumps, you know? I was so floored by it. It made such a strong impression. 

I literally remember going, wow, that's, that's what I wanna do. I wanna do that. That's what I want to do. And I was five and my whole focus ever since I was five, that has been my entire focus all my life. I've never really wavered, you know? Okay, maybe I wanted to be a cowboy for a little bit and an astronaut for a little bit. But I mean, it's always, always been singing. That's all, all that I ever wanted to do. 

Candy: Well, I think it's obvious that it's what you were meant to do. 

Mitch: Yeah, I guess. Here I am, you know, 56 years later. 

Candy: Right.

Mitch: And I'm still doing it. 

Candy: Right. 

Mitch: I may not be performing anymore

Candy: But do you still write songs? Do you still - 

Mitch: Never did write songs. Well, that's not true. I did write songs and I decided not to, uh, which wasn't necessarily the best choice of my life, um, but it is what it is, and I am here because of that choice. I decided to spend my time learning how to be the best singer I could possibly be. 

Writing songs is a very, very long, somewhat painful, uh, experience. And, you know, I was going through it and, you know, I had my little demo studio and everything, and I just found that I was spending more time, you know, twisting knobs and making sounds and doing this and doing that and not spending enough time singing, which is really what my passion is. So I thought, well, what I'll do is I will spend all my time and become the best singer that I could possibly be so I can interpret the songs that other people write as best I can, you know, uh, for them. Yeah, I never wrote songs, really. I, I wrote a couple, but - 

Candy: But you did perform cover, like you covered other people's songs on stage, didn't you? 

Mitch: Uh, that was my entire career. Um, well be, I toured for 37 years, right? In total. So, I've sung almost every genre of music out there, you know? I started singing rock and then moved into more pop and then did new wave, if anybody remembers what new wave was, and uh, then back into pop and rock and r&b and blues, and then decided that wasn't challenging enough anymore, and then sang nothing but opera for seven years? Six or seven years, something like that. Uh, I started that as a career. I wanted to make it a career, but I started it way too late. So, there wasn't really much of a chance of me blossoming into a, an opera, a full blown professional opera singer. 

And then somebody decided to pay me an awful lot of money to sing pop again. So, I went back to singing pop ‘cause I also had a family to feed. And um, that morphed into singing international music. Uh, because of my opera stuff, I can sing in five different languages or have sung in five different languages. And, um, so I had a big corporate band and we were known for doing everything, you know, Gypsy Kings to Play That Funky Music White Boy, you know.

Candy: Nice. 

Mitch: Uh, and then, um, moved more into the jazz side of things. Um, and the Andrea Bocelli, you know, the crossover, the mixture of pop and, and opera. ‘Cause that's really where my sensibility sat because I've sang pop for so long, and then just jazz, just sang jazz until, until the end. Did Three Tenor shows, and just a professional guy, just a jobbin’ guy just doing what I, what I could, you know. 

Candy: Well, I'm sorry that I'm so amazed about this stuff that you do. ‘Cause I really am, and I know how talented you are ‘cause I, well I met you when I was eleven. I was a li -

Mitch: You were just a little girl!

Candy: I was just a little kid!

Mitch: Yeah, yeah. 

Candy: And that's when I met you and I thought you were so cool and so talented then, and hearing all this stuff now, like, it's incredible that you ha, you can sing so many different genres. It’s awesome. I love it!

Mitch: That is, is, uh, one of my real strengths is being able to do that. Um, because what I teach is, uh, it's classically-based every, all vocal technique. I'm a, I'm a singing teacher, right? So, all vocal technique, that's for your audience, you know what I am. Um, the vocal technique is classically-based because it's been around that long. I mean, That's what it is. 

But because I, I studied myself for fifteen years, uh, in total, and then I applied it to all those different genres of music and, and because I was singing so much ‘cause when I was touring, uh, particularly for the first fifteen years or so, it was six nights a week. You can't really do that anymore, thank goodness. But I got to work what I learned and tweaked it for each individual style. 

You know, you don't approach an aria like you approach a rock tune, but there are elements that will save a voice. So, I got good at applying what I needed to for whichever genre I was singing at the time, and because I sang it so much, I got really good at, at it. And then I got good at explaining, translating, you know, the concepts, the classical concepts. Uh, so, a rock singer can actually understand what it is and why they need to do it. I was lucky. I, I got to do all of that stuff, you know? 

Candy: So, when was the moment, I guess, that you decided to become a vocal teacher? A vocal coach?

Mitch: It came about my, my, uh, very first vocal teacher at the time told me that he was retiring and he told me that, you know, this method that he was teaching was very rare and there was only two other people in Canada teaching it. He was one of them and he wanted to retire. And, um, I said, oh, that's kind of too bad.

Do you have anybody that is gonna kind of pick up the mantle and keep on going? And he said, no, not really. And I said, well, I might wanna, want to do that ‘cause again, my touring career, uh, the, the six nights a week every single night was, I could see the end beginning to come. You know, I had a very young family at that point in time. I wanted to, uh, you know, bolster the income and, and make sure that my family was taken care of, like, you know, that I could support them. So, I thought, well, maybe I, I should I, maybe I should give this a shot. 

You know, and, uh, I studied with him for a year to learn how to teach, which unfortunately wasn't really worth anything unfortunately. And then he never did retire anyway, but I threw my hat into the ring and, and you know, the first year I think I ended up, I think I had four students or something like that. You know, the first year I had four students and then something happened and the business exploded, and I, it, it increased by 400% over from one year to the next.

It just went (explosion sound), you know, and I was teaching, like all of a sudden I was teaching from one year from four students. I was teaching, uh, ten to twelve hours a day, uh, six days a week, you know. Um, and then gigging on top of it, going out and still hitting, you know, doing the clubs and, and, and gigging until one o'clock in the morning and then coming home and crashing and getting up at eight and having breakfast with the family, and then going to work at nine and teaching ‘til eight o'clock and then back out to the, the club for the next night. You know, it was, that's a lot of hours. That was basically when, when that happened, and it, it was 1990, you know, so I've been doing this for thirty-three years now. Yeah, that's basically why it happened. Uh, you know, I wanted to take care of my family and stuff like that, so. 

Candy: So, what are the most important things that a person can do to take care of their voice?

Mitch: There are several. Uh, number one is exercise the voice. Study would be, would be good because the thing that a lot of people don't quite understand is that people will, will, will pull up like, okay, I'm gonna get this warmup exercise from YouTube. That's all fine, but if you don't understand what you're supposed to be doing while you sing this exercise, you're just singing this exercise, you're not really getting the most bang for your buck, right?

So, yes, it will help, you know, because you're still working out and you know, that kind of thing. But if you understand what it is you're supposed to be doing, uh, you get a much, much better result. So, study if you can, uh, and warm up. You know, like, like work the voice, like work it out, you know? And that's not necessarily just singing these songs.

Um, there's so many other things going on when you sing a song, there's the lyric, there's the melody, there's the emotional intent, there's all these other things. You can't, you can't focus on just exercising the voice because it is a muscle, it's a set of muscles. Um, so it has to be done in a certain way to get the most benefit out of it.

You know, it's just like going, it's just like training at the gym, you know, if you want to get the most out of training at the gym, well, you want your form to be proper and you need somebody to show you how to do that because when you're doing it yourself, there's so many other things going on. You can't really figure that out, you know? Um, or not well anyway. It's much faster getting a, getting a coach.

Candy: I, I go to you and you also make me feel very comfortable. It's really uncomfortable sometimes using your voice in front of other people, right? 

Mitch: Absolutely. 

Candy: And so -

Mitch: Yeah, I, I try to, I try to make people at ease, you know, because it is, you know, learning how to sing, it's all trial and error and it's an instrument that's completely internal.

You can't see it, you can't touch it, and a lot of times you can't even feel it, you know. So, it's so ambiguous. It's not like any other instrument that you can, you know, see, you can watch your position, all that sort of thing. So, it's all trial and error. I tell everybody, everybody, I don't care if you crack or go sharp or flat or suck, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we get the work done and things will improve. If, if you crack or you, you, you know, go off pitch, it's like, oh, well, that didn't work. Okay, let's try, let's try this. You know, it is trial and error. So, yeah, people are nervous usually when they come to me, but it doesn't last long because it just doesn't matter, you know?

Candy: And you're, I mean -

Mitch: It doesn’t matter.

Candy: You're very easygoing too, so it's, yeah, it's nice. 

Mitch: Yeah, yeah.

Candy: But when, when we do, you know, that work I, I just think it's so cool that you're able to say, oh, hold on, and I can't hear something, but you hear it very differently because of what you do. 

Mitch: That's right. And it's also the way the, that my brain works. Drink lots of water, a lot more than what you think, you know, because the problem is, is that the vocal cords are a non-essential part of the body. If you are dehydrated at all and you drink a bunch of water, um, your brain is gonna go, oh my God, there's water. Okay, well I'm gonna direct that water to the kidneys and to, you know, the liver where I really need it. Chords, vocal cords? Nah, nah. They can wait, they can wait. You know what I mean? So, you wanna stay hydrated all the time.

Uh, and the other thing is humidifiers, uh, very, very important, particularly when it's like, -13 today. Uh, and the heating systems are on and you know, there's snow in the windows and, uh, you want a humidifier in the bedroom while you sleep. That's most important. 

I found this very intrig - interesting. I was an, uh, uh, provincial level athlete when I was a kid.

Um, I was the Alberta Shot Put champion for five years. I surpassed my coach probably three or four months into training. He couldn't show me anything anymore, so. I found a lot of joy taking a silly metal ball, and I would throw this metal ball from one side of the field to another every single lunch hour. But what I did was I analyzed every single little movement that I made. Okay, what does this do? What does this do? How about if I move like this? And, and, it was all technique. I only became provincial champion because of technique, not because I was a really big strapping, strong kid that had loss of muscle. It was because I spent hours and hours and hours working on technique.

So, when I came to singing, I toured for three years before I studied, but then, uh, I decided that I wanted to figure out what I was doing, ‘cause I wasn't consistent. So, I, I stopped touring and I studied for o - for a year and a half straight. All those tricks and all the, all, all that approach from being an athlete completely works for singing because it is trial and error.

It is little tiny adjustments. It's, it's this, it's that, you know? So, I found that I could analyze singing like being an athlete. I'm re - I'm very, very highly attuned to it because now I've also been doing it forever, you know, so what you may not notice, I'll notice because I've been there. Oh yeah, that doesn't work, so let's, I'll show you how to do it. 

Candy: So, I wanna know, how often do you do your vocal exercises? 

Mitch: Honestly? You really wanna know?

Candy: I really wanna know. 

Mitch: Okay. I haven't worked out in five years. I retired in 2018 and I haven't sung since, but I do them all day with students. 

Candy: It's true. 

Mitch: I don't train myself right, but I do them with students, uh, every six days a week. Should I? Yes. I should start and I actually have to start doing it now, um, so I can keep up with some of my students and, uh, some of them are quite, quite advanced. I'm just starting to notice as I age, okay, well that's not sitting as well as it used to. Well, okay. It's just time for me to start training again, so I'll start training again, but yeah.

Candy: Would you say that as you age, taking care of your voice is something that is even more important?

Mitch: Um, yes. Uh, if you're a singer, if that's, you know, what you, what you do or what you wanna do. Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, the, the benefit of youth is the energy and the recovery time, um, which most people don't even think about.

Uh, you know, if you sing a hard show when you're young, it's easy enough to recover, you know, you bounce back. Just it, it's, it's exactly the same as going to the gym. You know, you go to the gym when you're twenty-five, oh man, you can go for a long time. You got lots of endurance, lots of stamina, and you know, you might be a bit sore the next day, but man, you can go at it again. You can go for it again.

By the time you're fifty or fifty-five however, um, you cannot work out like you did when you were even thirty-five. It just does not work. Can you lift the same amount of weight? Probably, but you can't do it the same frequency that you did it when you were twenty-five or thirty or thirty-five. So, the recovery time is longer. You can still do it, but it still takes a little longer for the body to recover. As you age, you do, you want to try and keep it as in, you know, the best shape as possible to minimize that recovery time ‘cause if you're outta shape, that means you're gonna work harder, which means your recovery time is gonna be longer and if you're on tour and you've got three shows in a row before you get a break hmmm, that's not necessarily going to go very well. 

Candy: So, are there any things that you tell the people you work with, things that you shouldn't do? 

Mitch: So much of it is actual common sense, but like I said, I, I, you know, I work with rock stars, essentially. Keep the drinking to an absolute minimum. It's really hard on the body, hard on the brain, and, and it's very hard on the voice. Um, it dehydrates you very quickly so you even need to up the amount of water that you, you're drinking, ‘cause I try to get everybody to be drinking between three to four liters of water a day, to, to keep everything, uh, lubricated here.

And if then, if you start throwing beer or shots on top of that, will that, you know, the body's gonna rob some of that water for that and it lowers inhibitions and you sing harder than you should and you know, all that kind of thing. You don't sleep very well. And there's all that end of things.

Don't smoke, you know, it limits your lung capacity and that's important. The hard drugs, well, that's kind of a no-brainer. Don't, don't do that stuff. Other than, you know, the obvious things don't, um, scream a lot. You know, one of the hardest things for singers, uh, is, you know, they go do a show and they're, did, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the problem arises in the meet and greet which is when you're talking to people and if there's a lot of noise in the background, you end up pushing and shoving the voice and you, you actually do more harm than singing the actual show. Um, so you wanna, you wanna be aware of that and, and minimize that as much as you can, but it's still, it's a part of the job. You know, get as much sleep as, don't stay up, don't party all the time. You know.

Candy: I was told that it’s harder on your voice to whisper? 

Mitch: It can be, yeah. Because when you do this, the cords are apart, so you get all kinds of air going through the cords. But if you keep the cords together and get a solid tone, you, you use a lot less air. You use way less energy. And the, the, the cords are in the optimum position. They're not bowing up and apart, so that's right.

Candy: So, what happens when you scream? 

Mitch: Scream properly or just scream scream?

Candy: Let's say scream scream. 

Mitch: They go nuts. Everything is just is all over the map and it's really hard on the muscles and, and the cords themselves get really abused ‘cause they start slamming together and stuff. It's, it's really, it's really hard on them. 

Candy: How, how do you scream properly? 

Mitch: It takes a bit of a, a bit of time to find, but a lot of singers will scream from the throat underneath. You actually want the sound, you want the feeling, it's up between the upper back teeth, it's like up by the soft palette and there's a, a gripping up there and you kind of wanna manipulate, uh, people will call them false chords and uh, whatever. It's just this kind of thing and, and you'll find once you get it, you can, you can completely control. It takes, it does take some time and you'll cough and you'll get foggy. And it, it, it feels like you're hurting the voice, but you're not. Once you get good at it, you can literally turn the grid up, turn it down, you have full control over it.

Um, when I was good at it, because it does take practice, um, I could scream my face off singing rock. Do three one hour sets a night, six nights a week, or seven nights a week and get off stage talking just like this. As, as if nothing, nothing happened, which is really where you wanna be as a singer. You wanna be able to have that kind of control, which is why I stopped singing pop and rock because there wasn't anything I couldn't do at that point in time, so I wanted more of a challenge. So, I went to sing opera, which is the most difficult, uh, stuff to sing. Uh, but then came back to pop and rock because like I said, it is where the heart is plus somebody was paying me a shit load of money, so.

Candy: The combo of both.

Mitch: I know. Yeah. 

Candy: One thing that I always found really cool and interesting about the vocal lessons with you is that you have a way of explaining when singing a low note, we do something in our bodies that works against us. But you had taught me to kind of look down on the note, is that kind of correct? So - 

Mitch: Placement. Mmhmm.

Candy:Right and that was so fascinating to me. So, when I sing a low note now I can do it so much better because I'm not. What am I doing in my body when I'm doing it wrong? 

Mitch: Holding the larynx really low and just thinking, ah, really, really low. Yeah, you want, you want the low note to be here, and then mentally you wanna feel like you're sitting right on top of the sound. It's not down here, and it's also not very loud. People also have a tendency of thinking, kay, because it's a low note, I have to work really hard so people can hear it. If it is placed properly, you get a lot of resonance, which is that buzz in a sound that actually gets the sound to carry.

Uh, you can't push low notes. Oh, you can't make them huge, uh, volume wise, all you can do is get as much resonance as you can in order to get them to work as efficiently as possible. Because after every low note, there's always higher notes, you know, and every, everything that you sing affects the next note. So, if you're out of position for your low notes, you're screwed for anything above that.

Candy: That’s just fascinating. So, when you sing higher notes, though, how, how should you be focusing on doing a high note? 

Mitch: It depends on what kind of high note you're talking about. Like, if you're talking about just a regular, you know, a higher, a higher note in your range, you just sing it. You know, forward onto the hard palette. Yeah, well, there's two surfaces in the head in which you can actually focus the sound of your voice off. One is the soft palette, which is from the uvula there in the back of the throat, to about a third towards the roof of mouth. And from that point to the front teeth is the hard palette.

We wanna focus the sound on the hard pallete all the time, and it creates resonance and gets a voice out of the throat. There's a whole bunch of stuff that it does. Like, if you do an m, mmm or an n, nnn, the tip of the tongue is here and that's where you want to focus your sound. Uh, it gets out, like I said, there's, there's a, there's a whole bunch of benefits that happen when you do that. And singing low notes, you want it right here, right on the hard pallete. You don't want it, feel, it, feel like it's dropping, dropping low. You want it here. 

Candy: This is why it's so important for people who are singing - 

Mitch: Want to sing.

Candy: Wanna sing, to go to a vocal coach, because these aren't things that necessarily someone just thinks of in their head.

Mitch: Absolutely not. And the, the, the, the hard part for people to accept is this is not something that you can learn from Youtube. Nor is it something that you can learn from a book. You can, you can learn the concepts, but actually doing those concepts you almo - you, you pretty well need a, a second pair of ears who know what they're doing and what they're listening for to guide you through it.

Um, ‘cause one of the, one of the hardest things for people to understand is that what you hear inside your head and what comes out can be very, very different. Very different. When I was young, I, I thought I sounded like Pavarotti. I was convinced, oh yeah, no, I can do this. Not a chance, man. Not even close, but in my head I sounded like Pavarotti. But no. 

Candy: How important is it for a person to sing within their vocal range? 

Mitch: Well, it is very important if you don't wanna hurt yourself, essentially. You know, I'm not gonna sing any Mariah Carey stuff. It's just I, I can, you know, ‘cause I've got all the top end that I pretty well want. It is not gonna sound very good and over time, well it may not hurt me because I also know what I'm doing, but other people, you know, yeah, you're gonna, you're just gonna hurt yourself. 

Um, but the vocal range is kind of misleading because most people have a lot more range than what they think. You know, I've always wanted to sing Robert Plant, not me, but, you know, but I don't know how to do it. But if you learned how to do it and do it properly, yeah. You actually might be able to sing like Robert Plant, you know, you just have to know how to do it right. You know, and it's always a, it's always a, an exciting discovery to go, oh my God, now I could never do that before. Now, now you can. 

Candy: Do you believe that everybody or most people are capable of being able to sing?

Mitch: Yes, but there's a big butt there. The follow up question should really be, is everybody capable of being a world-class vocalist? Because, almost everybody that wants to sing, I mean, that, that I deal with anyway, uh, me included, wanna be stars, wanna be a rock star, wanna be a pop star, wanna be known as, uh, as a, a, a great singer.

At least that's, that's where I started off, right? And the answer is no, not everybody is, has that, uh, ability, um, there is a level of talent that's required. You know, I say this and everything is changing in the music, everything's changing in the world. Can you be a tic, TikTok star? Yes, absolutely. It has a lot to do with luck, but to actually be a world class quality vocalist is really what I'm talking about, not a social media star because you did something, it went viral. That's a different, that's a different game. 

To be a world-class singer, uh, there is a level of innate talent that you have to be born with. It's not necessarily something that you can develop. There has to be something there. Um, so there's a talent issue, um, that will hopefully grow because everybody's given a little bit of talent anyway. And, but then there has to be a genetic disposition for it, as well. You have to have the right holes in your skull and the right genetic structure here, the muscle structure here, um, size and length, the vocal cords. There's, there's, there's stuff.

And then on top of that you have to be fascinated with it, uh, and want to do it and want to experiment with it. You know, I firmly believe some of the best voices in the world are brick layers, or a baker or a housekeeper. They have all that stuff except for the fascination with it. Do I wanna do this? No, not really. But they have everything that's required, but they don't do it. So, all those things have to line up in order for that to kind of happen. 

Candy: So, you interview musicians and you have videos on your website and on YouTube - 

Mitch: Yep!

Candy: With, with those videos. So, do you wanna tell us a little bit about that? 

Mitch: Uh, yeah. I have two video series, um, that's on my website. Uh, in the blog section or even on the first page, there's a set of buttons and there's one series that's called, uh, Sing Like A Pro interview series. I started doing that because there is so much information to know if you want to become a singer. Um, I mean, I grew up with it and learned it on the fly, and I teach everybody that, or tell everybody who wants to know that studies with me what you do. But I thought, why not actually learn what some of the, you know, rock stars that I deal with, what is their mindset? What do they do? What did they do to get to where they are? What were the steps, how, how to do this? That's what that series is all about.

And I, you know, talked to, you know, people like, uh, Matt Walst from Three Days Grace, Ian Thornley from Big Wreck, Luna Lee, Stefan Babcock from PUP to, you know, Gavin Brown. Uh, a very, very well known Canadian producer, uh, Howard Benson. A very, a very well respected LA producer who, who specializes in producing vocals on a record.

Uh, you know, so getting their insight in terms of what they look for, what they help singers do in the studio. So, there's that series that I, that I work with, um, that I've done. And then there's another video series called Singer Survival Tips. It's all about what do you do to survive on the road or as a singer, like talk about humidifiers, talk about zinc and vitamin C for health. Talk about, um, you know, hydration, talk about warming up. I talk about all that stuff so people get an explanation on what it's all about. 

Candy: That's very cool. And we'll put all the links in the description of this video so people can go and watch that. 

Mitch: Sure. 

Candy: Does it help to do your warmup in the shower? 

Mitch: Yes. Uh, highly reflective surface, so you get, you can hear yourself very, very well. And then nice steamy hot. Yeah, it's wonderful. Yeah, I used to, uh, before every show I would warm up in the shower and then go do the show. And then when I was gigging an awful lot, I would take a real long hot bath after the show, get moisture back into the throat and get everything to relax and, and settle down. The shower's wonderful. Yeah, the steam room's the same kind of thing. 

Candy: I really appreciate you coming here today. You have so much

Mitch: You’re very - 

Candy: Cool stuff to share. 

Mitch: And that's only a fraction of it. 

Candy: It's only a tiny bit.

Mitch: I know, you know, it's funny, you know, I, I've been doing this for thirty-three years now, and it's, I have had other jobs, not a lot of them, but I have had other jobs. This is the only job I've ever had that I'm still fascinated with. Like, it's still, like I, I coming to teach people is not a burden for me at all. I don't have a problem getting outta bed and coming downstairs, ‘cause I still find it fascinating, you know, so I, I think it's pretty cool. Not everybody does, but I think it's pretty cool.

Candy: I think it's cool, too. 

Mitch: Yeah.

Candy: Um, so are you taking on any new clients or is that not a thing? 

Mitch: I'm always taking on new clients. The, the, the, you know, people come and leave and, and you know, uh, there's always, there's always turnover. So, people just, yeah. Get ahold of me and I meet them first and talk about what they wanna do and then we go, then we go from there. 

Candy: Awesome. Well, thanks for hanging out with me today. 

Mitch: Very cool. No problem at all. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.