Hey guys, welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, where the proof is in the singing!
We got a lot of requests for this one, it’s head voice and resonance, or head voice resonance.
What is head voice, and what is resonance, and how does it work together?
Well, actually, depending on who you ask, you’re going to get a lot of different definitions
from different people, and let me explain what I mean by that.
If you go into the opera world, and you asked someone in Bel Canto or Appoggio, and you
say hey, what is head voice?
Maestro might say to you head voice is anything that resonates in the head!
And he’ll be very emphatic about that.
Well, so, in other words, let’s take Pavarotti, when he does the end of Nessun Dorma, and
he hits that big”B”at the end, and he goes “Vincero!”
And he has this big note at the end right?
Well, yeah…
That does resonate in his head, but I actually used a form of a reinforced falsetto just
now to demonstrate what I’m about to demonstrate in a second, whereas he would be using a belted
chest voice resonant sound that he’s worked out as this big, beautiful, open throat, strongly
supported, well-placed vowel sound, and so that would be their definition of head voice.
This is true for the soprano, as well, except head voice in the soprano is looked at differently
because their vocal folds are shaped differently.
And head voice can also mean something that resonates within the falsetto register that
is nice and bright, with a bright timbral sound.
Why this is important is because I actually have redefined this term for myself, over
time, and I’ll explain why.
In the 70's, mid to late 70's, and, yes, Grandpa’s been doing this for a long time, ha ha.
And I’ve studied the voice for a very long time.
There was a shift that happened in the pop contemporary world that kind of separated
themselves from the bel canto, appoggio, operatic world.
And what happened was when they were trying to create a definition for head voice for
the female voice, they would call chest voice whatever was in their belting register or
their call register, as it’s called in Broadway, their call or calling out. Shouting - belting register.
And by the way, let’s go through the registrations really quick.
There’s a speaking register, like I’m talking to you now, then there’s a primo passaggio,
which is a passageway that goes from your speaking register into your call or belting
register, that you have to kind of shift gears to get into, right?
To go into belt.
And then from the belting register on up into your falsetto or head voice register.
So again, in the late 70s, what happened was, for the female voice they just kind of threw
it all together and they called anything that was, for the female voice in head voice was
falsetto or reinforced falsetto, that was their definition.
So, there was the speaking register, the belting register, and the head voice register.
In the male tenor, or the male voice, or baritone and tenor voices, they kept with the tenets
of the way the operatic world looked at it, and they said anything that resonates in your head.
So, you have your speaking register, you have your call or belting register, and then you
have your head voice register, which is your call/belting register, and then falsetto
is something completely different.
Now, if you notice, too, especially in the opera world…
This is important, because a lot of the stuff has this foundation.
It comes from all this stuff and, you know, you wonder, gosh, how did they figure all
of this out?
And where did they get this?
And what is the foundation for all of this stuff?
In bel canto, if you listen to a tenor, for example, you don’t really hear a lot of
falsetto stuff.
You hear the big bravado, you know macho top, big belting note at the end of the night,
and then that’s what the tenor was known for, those big powerful notes.
You didn’t really hear any sweet, sensitive, and sometimes you did, but with the lyric
tenors and some other things.
But, you didn’t really hear a lot of the sensitivities way up in the upper
register, in their falsetto register, because in the mind of the Maestro, the Maestro didn’t
care about the softer tones, he cared about the money notes, or the big notes.
That was what was important to them.
So I thought that was really confusing.
I thought it was weird to have two different standards for a male voice, and female voice.
So I actually chose to just simplify this and say you have your speaking register, you
have your call or belting register, and then you have your head voice, which is synonymous
with falsetto register.
With a little twist.
Here’s what I mean by that.
We can sing in falsetto in a Flutie, Hootie tone and go”Hooo!
Hoooo!Hooo!”
And that’s not really, it might be fine for some R&B stuff, but that’s not a powerful
head voice register.
What we want to do is develop a nice, bright ping in a powerful head voice register, first,
to grow that, and mesh it, or marry it together with our chest voice: “LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”
So we can have one long powerful note connecting them, where if I’m up singing really high,
you don’t know that I’m not in my belting register.
You think I'm belting all the way up, sometimes I am, because I know how to stretch my chest
voice up really high, but I also know how to relax and release off into my head voice,
because I’ve grown the resonance of my head voice to match the tone of my chest voice.
Now this might sound complicated.
It’s not as complicated as it sounds, though it’s a lot of hard work.
By the way, I cover all of this in my singing course
called How To Sing Better Than Anyone Else.
With all of the different exercises necessary and all of the different vocal timbre’s
that you have to work at, in order to be able to fuse these things together to create that long
powerful note.
Let’s get back now to the falsetto register.
So, what we really want to do, in fact, we'll just do a couple of quick exercises.
Okay.
We want to start with a really bright, timbral sound.
We don’t want a Hootie-Flutie sound, we want it nice and bright.
So I’ve chosen the EE vowel, because that’s one of the brightest, most pointed, kind of
mask, facial sounds, that we can use our vowels that we can use.
So, I’m going to start on an F#5, and were going to roll, rock this sound all
the way down into our chest voice as far as we can.
Now, we don’t want to over-bloat the sound, so when we get lower, we don’t want to push
too hard.
The goal is to maintain this brightness.
Now, we really do need to go through all the vowels and in my course I have a series of
exercises to how to really conquer this, and I can’t cover this all in one lesson, like
I said, but I just want to give you a flavor of this.
So, as we go down, tenors, bari’s, altos, and contraltos…
You are going to start up here, you shouldn’t have too much trouble.
Sopranos, you might want to start three or four notes higher, and then work your voice
down there.
And bari’s, you might have a little bit of a tough time even starting on this first
note, but if you can, it’s going to go like this. Just simple:
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Maintain a nice, bright timbral sound…
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Now as you get lower, you’re going to notice it’s a little harder to maintain the brightness
and the volume until you’ve built that muscle up enough to where it can sustain that much
sound pressure down, as we're going down here.
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
And you notice the lower we go, the harder it is to maintain any kind of volume or stability
in the sound.
So you’ve got to keep working at it to grow that.
Now one more real important thing about this is, like I cover in my course, we can’t
just do one exercise, we have to do quite a few, however, when we grow our head voice,
in the context that I use head voice, or the definition, it actually can atrophy, and usually
does, your chest voice.
What does atrophy mean?
It makes it weak, or not as robust, or you might find that you’re losing a couple of
notes on your chest voice, if you’ve been working your chest voice register up, cause
it kind of tears at it a little bit.
Well, so when you’re all said and done, eventually what you’ll do is you’ll do
your chest voice workouts like every couple three days you do chest voice workouts, then
you do one day of head voice.
You do these exercises.
Then a couple three days of chest voice get your chest voice nice and strong again, then
one day of head voice.
Then eventually then you just combine them as one solid workout to where it doesn’t
atrophy chest, and like I said it fuses together for that one long powerful note.
All right guys.
I hope this was helpful to you.
God bless you, and until next time, peace.
Out.