Being a guitarist who has done backup vocals typically, my throat didn’t have the endurance to last a whole night when I started having to sing more. I tried adding singing exercises and breathing exercises to my daily life, and while those things helped strengthen my voice overall, they didn’t help when my throat started getting irritated. So I started looking for things to eat or drink to help with my overall voice health, especially in a preventative sense. This included things such as drinking various flavors of hot tea, drinking more juice and water, and taking different multivitamins. Everything I tried either didn’t help me at all, helped so little it was practically imperceptible, or simply helped at that moment but was not something I could use during a gig. Then I came across Vocal-eze. I had used a similar throat spray years ago with no effect so I was a bit skeptical about it. After reading multiple user reviews on it, I finally swung by a shop that carried it and got a bottle.
Well first good thing I can say is that it doesn’t taste bad. The last throat spray I used made me cringe when it hit the tongue. Vocal-eze isn’t exactly a good tasting flavor in my opinion, as it has what to me seems to be a toffee-like taste, but it doesn’t make me cringe from the taste either. Secondly, after finding Vocal-eze and reading reviews of it, I started looking at other throat sprays out there on the market including the one I had previously tried. Every single one of them used alcohol as the base. Vocal-eze uses glycerin instead. In the descriptions on the retail sites this difference was brought up, and even though this is an important difference, the product description simplifies it too much. Alcohol is treated by the body as a poison, so your body tries to rid itself of this poison. This means your body releases more fluids to flush out the poison which increases urination and more importantly dehydration. When you are spraying something containing alcohol straight to the back of you mouth to coat your throat, you are inviting your body to respond as it is meant to and that will involve drying your throat out. Singing with a dry throat is not pleasant.
In contrast, glycerin is commonly used in medicines due to its sweetening and moisturizing properties. It is also used in ointments and creams to keep them from drying out. So right there Vocal-eze has a clear difference to make it stand out from the rest of the pack. Add the fact that the rest of the ingredients are all herbal, and you have a winner. This spray will not make you sing great if you can’t already. Rather it helps you and your throat cope with the physical stress involved with singing for long periods or when sick. I personally rely more on drinking water during a performance to help my throat but I now keep this at the ready for the moment I start to feel that scratchy irritation in my throat.