Hi, Matthew, and sincere congratulations on managing to quit what must be one of the WORST things a singer can do, quite aside from its general health benefits.  Short term, cheerleading might be worse, but long term singing and smoking don't go together very well.

 

I can share with you some personal experiences that might help put things into perspective.  Through the '60s my quartet, The Four Saints (both vocal and instrumental, but never a "band" in the modern sense) was continuously on tour, working up to 360 days a year.  We did a lot of college concerts and community concerts, but our bread-and-butter work was night clubs, doing 2, 3, or 4 shows a night, usually 6 nights a week.  And the problem was that the clubs were usually chilled down with air conditioning, so we would be going back and forth from muggy weather outside into a very cold working environment almost every day.  And at one point, our top tenor, Jerry, went to see a particular doctor (who was very much into wholistic medicine), who laid it on the line and pointed out that regardless of general health benefits, it was simply STUPID for any singer to be inhaling very hot, smoky air time after time, drying out the tissues and irritating them beyond belief.  And with that, and the STRONG support of his wife, he managed to quit.

 

But for a long time the other three guys all smoked, although I did not.  (Perhaps the result of growing up in a family of school teachers in the '40s and '50s!)  And what happened time after time, almost as regularly as clockwork, was that we'd start losing our voices, always from the top down, starting with Jerry.  (Basses never seem to lose their voices!)  And it finally got so bad that we had to cancel a contract and take some time off to go home and recover.

 

While we were home, Jerry and I went to see the excellent voice teacher we had started studying with in high school.  And Jerry's voice was so non-existent that he couldn't even croak out a sound.  So we just sat there for a couple of hours, and our teacher patiently went over everything that he had tried to teach us, reminding us of how the voice works, what has to be done to take care of it, and other stuff that a working singer simply MUST know and adjust to in order to keep his instrument functioning. 

 

Well, long story short, it worked!  Jerry got his voice back after a couple of weeks of complete vocal rest, and started treating it as the delicate thing it really is, his voice got clear and focused, and yes, his upper register expanded to the point that in every new arrangement I wrote for us I tried to give him at least one high note a halfstep higher than the last one I had written!  He was not by any means a countertenor, but his voice was a lot more flexible than your standard operatic tenor voice and had an excellent head voice range.  Our 2nd tenor had more of a standard tenor voice.  Me, I sang bari, but was actually more of a 3rd tenor!!

 

So the best advice I can give you is to take it easy, pay attention to what your voice and your body tell you and take care of them, and give yourself time to continue recovering the voice that you SHOULD have if you hadn't been abusing it.  Don't overuse it, and learn to mark in rehearsals rather than singing full voice all the time, but mark using good vocal production and breath management.  WARM UP thoroughly starting in an easy middle register and don't ever go for the extremes until you are completely warmed up and flexible.  (Talk to dancers about the importance of warmups; you're just using muscles that are a lot smaller than the ones they are concerned with!) 

 

When my countertenor son first auditioned for Chanticleer they liked his voice, but told him flat out that he would not yet be able to survive their touring schedule.  They were right!  He continued studying and learning how to care for his voice, and the second time he auditioned they offered him a contract on the spot.  But he (and all the other guys in the group) knew better than to party and miss sleep and do things that would damage their instruments, and if you're going to be a singer as a profession that's exactly what you have to learn and how you have to live.  And there's no reason in the world that you can't be a great teacher AND a professional-caliber singer if that is what makes you happy.  Hopefully that's more important than starting back smoking to you.

All the best,

John

There is a website with a lot of information about vocal technique like breath support, warming ups, larynx position,vocal health, etc. You can also watch videos and documentaries.

 

https://sites.google.com/site/vocaltechniquetips/

 

New articles are added to the site on a regular basis.

Maybe there is some information that can help you.

Matthew,