Today we offer you the secret to achieving that seamless transition through your entire range.
The biggest problem among singers isn’t being able to hit those higher notes, hold a note for longer, or deliver more volume. It is something much more complicated and tricky: blending or “bridging” their chest voice and head voice.
Once you figure out what your chest and head voices do well, you can focus on bringing those strengths together and creating a stronger more well rounded voice!
Your Chest and Head Voices
Your chest and head voices do overlap, but they do so in the middle of your range.
You need to be careful of this area, as switching too often between chest and head voice causes a song to sound disjointed and unpleasant to listen to. What you want to do is to visualize your sternum and head working in balance, so that all the notes you produce sound blended.
Thus, as a singer, your goal should be balance and connectivity between your chest and head voices. You should be able to move smoothly and seamlessly from the lowest notes in your range to the highest, without effort. Your vocal cords will open and close freely through their entire range of motion, without effort or strain.
Unfortunately, the major barrier to a seamless, connected head and chest voice is the break, the point at which your voice “sticks” as you change register.
Try the following exercise.
1. Sing a scale, using a Piano to set the initial note. Check out Singorama 2.0 with the virtual keyboard and mini recording studio to make this process easy to achieve.
Choose a note which is toward the bottom of your range.
Listen to the example:
2. Now, go up a half-step for the next starting note, and sing another scale.
Make sure that your tone is clear, not breathy. Pay attention to which area (your sternum or your nose/forehead) is vibrating.
3. Continue until you find an area where your voice jams up or shifts in quality, where you feel as if you have to switch “voices” to get those higher notes. This is your break, or the point at which your chest and head voices are disconnected.
Now that you have found your break, use the Piano to help you locate the area that your break falls on.
Connecting the Voices
Your task is not just to find your break—but to eliminate it. This is very difficult and can take years. Some singers don’t even bother to connect their chest and head voices; instead, they incorporate the two separate voices into their style.
Nevertheless, the most agile singers find that a connection between their two voices enables them to create music the kind of music of which they’d only dreamed.
Exercises to Bridge the Gap
One excellent exercise to blend your head and chest voices is the ‘ng’ siren introduced in letter 6. Along with that exercise, you can do the following:
Try this exercise. On a ‘tah’ sound…
1. Using the Piano, play a note which is a few notes above the area you shaded in earlier (i.e., in the upper register, or your head voice range).
2. Sing this note in your head voice as if you are crying. The feeling of crying should come from inside your mouth. This is your sob voice, and you may experience some vibrato.
3. Sing down the scale, trying to stay in your head voice.
Listen to the example:
4. Stop when you can no longer stay in your head voice but need to move to your chest voice.
Now sing down the scale again. Start in your head voice, but as you approach the shaded note, try to transition into your chest voice when you feel it coming on. Come in lightly to the chest voice; do not “fall” into it.
7. Keep practicing this until you hear no definite break between your two voices.
Repeat the exercise, this time singing from low to high. Move cleanly from your chest voice to your head voice.
Listen to the example:
Make sure that you retain good posture and do not move your jaw.
Repeat the exercise, this time singing it as an arpeggio.
An arpeggio is a breakdown of a whole cord, where each note of the chord is played individually.
In this case, the arpeggio will be Do, Mi, So, Do, So, Mi, Do, where the notes move from Do upwards to the Do seven notes above it, then down again to the original Do. Sing the arpeggio slowly, paying close attention to blending your two voices into a uniform tone.
Listen to the example:
You can feel these exercises working by thinking about which parts of your chest and head are vibrating during the exercise. Around your break area, or transition point, you should feel a smooth continuation of vibrations between your sternum and your mouth/nose/forehead. With enough practice, you will find that you will no longer have a jump between your chest and head voices. Rather, as you reach the break point that you shaded in on the piano diagram earlier, you will feel both areas of your body vibrating.
Wow!! How are you feeling? Is singing training like you expected? Laying the foundation for a singing-quality voice can feel like enormous work at first. However, once you have gotten used to training those unfamiliar vocal muscles, you’ll find that all these seemingly difficult exercises are actually quite easy and fun!
Coming Up...
In the next newsletter you’ll learn about Breathing your way to success. In this lesson we give you great technique to enable you to support your voice and create a better sound as well as reach those power notes with ease. So keep an eye on your screen and get ready to breath your way to success!
Another Singorama Success Story!
Nadia E.
United Kingdom
...The other thing I really liked about singorama was your mini-recording studio, that I found really valuable because you can't really improve your singing if you don't hear it. I was using an old tape recorder and it's just a pain because you sing, you sing a few songs or you sing a few scales and then you want to find it again a day or two later, oh especially if you left it a few days later because it is then like, oh wait where was that one, where was that practise, I need to know for the...You can't find it, or you are guessing which was which. Where as with the singorama mini recording studio everything is filed away. It is just a lot more convenient and easier to use.!
Connecting your chest and head voice, can seem tedious. But when you master it, it opens the way to provide you with the skills to achieve ease in many singing disciplines such as opera, jazz, pop to name a few. Check out Singorama 2.0 for great teaching on the connected voice and what you can achieve with it.