How to Strengthen your Head Voice.
Well, this is true for both guys and girls, and everybody’s voice type is different,
and everybody’s range is different, and everybody’s approach to singing is very different,
in whatever styles they want to sing in.
But it’s critical to understand that there’s a lot of misconceptions floating around the
Internet that I would like to kind of just bring home to roost here for a second
so I can share with you how I built my head voice, and I have a very very powerful, strong
head voice, and what it is that I did to grow that.
And there may be other people that have their ways.
I’m going to share with you my secrets, okay?
The first thing is there’s this misconception that everything has to be loud.
Big and loud.
Or all of a sudden it’s about struggling and getting to this big, loud space.
It actually couldn’t be further from the truth, in fact, when I first started to develop
head voice, I started with really small spaces.
In fact, we're going to do this together, you and me, and we’re going to do small vowel
sounds because that’s the easiest way to get a nice bright timbre, that bright ping,
remember?
Ping is king!
That real bright sound!
So, we’re going to start on an EE vowel, and I want to discuss this as we go.
Now, guys and girls, I’m going to start kind of high.
Guys, if you can get up this high, and if you can’t, just join us when you can, I’m
going to go down the food chain here…
Ladies, you’ll join me now, and you’re going to join me all the way into the registration
I’m about to do.
Now if I went: “EEE” most people have kind of a Flutie, Hootie “EEEEEE”
It's kind of a real Flutie, Hootie, airy sort of space.
Well that’s actually detrimental for your vocal folds, and it’ll dry them out very
quickly, and you won’t achieve this bright ping, “Ping is King” that we’re looking for.
So what we want to do is we want to close down the sound really bright, into the front
of the face, into the mask, and we want to go: “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” nice
and bright.
Now, as you get better at this, and as you can lean into this sound and as you can create
more resonance for the sound, you’ll be able to go: “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE,
EE” but for our purposes here, I’m going to back way off on the sound, and you can
have derivations or percentages you know of the light “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE”
or “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” or “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” depending
on, you know, what song your singing or you know, mezzo piano, mezzo forte, it just depends
on what you’re looking to do.
So join with me, but focus solely on how you can bring a bright timbral sound to this.
So if you’re really airy on the sound, maybe I’m up too high for you, and you might want
to start a little lower.
So let’s go to the next one: “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE”
“EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” the brighter the better, and we don’t need
volume.
By the way, again: dispelling the idea that volume is everything.
Well, volume comes about, not by force.
It comes about by resonance.
It comes about by doing this and growing the muscle, correctly, in a way where when it
gets bigger and bigger and bigger, when you add a little more strength in the abdomen:
“EEEEEEEEE” you can actually kind of hit it in the abdomen a little bit, relax the
chest neck and throat, and just relax into that space and resonance takes over and resonance
does the work.
You don’t see me straining in the throat to do this, right?
I’m rolling into the sound and hitting a cool, God-given amphitheater of that vowel
I’ve created, that God created, to give us the space in the sound.
So:”EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” ”EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE”
Okay.
Now you can kind of toggle back and forth and go up a little higher or a little lower,
but that sound, if you work it and work it and work it, you’re going to notice that
your head voice, or your falsetto, which is translated into head voice, become stronger
and brighter and more powerful and it will match the sound of your chest voice so that
you can go “LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY” and go in and out of the passaggio and connect
and fuse these together and have a percentage of chest head mix, which is called mixed voice,
where you can decide how much chest you want to put into the sound, how much head voice
you want to put into the sound, and how much you want to mix the sound.
So now, we went on EE, because EE is a nice bright timbral sound.
It’s really frontal, it’s got a lot of good space, and it brings a lot into the velo-nasal
port in the front of the face.
But the next thing we can do is ooh.
Now, ooh is actually part of the “AH/OH” family of vowels.
And we talked about the family of vowels in one of our other sessions, and I don’t have
time to go into that now, but if we go to ooh, we start out on oh, cause we can’t
sing ooh, we’d get caught in the throat.
We go Oh/Ooh really quickly, and we go: “Oh-oooooooh!
Oh-ooooooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.”
Do it with me…
Oh-ooooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh…
Okay, now…
The lower we can bring down our head voice, now we’ve talked about this before.
At first, we want to grow a nice robust, powerful chest voice first, to be able to buttress
and sustain and hold up our head voice.
So we’ve got to build the foundation first.
I cover all of this in building chest voice.
This is a secondary thing, a complement to that, where we come back now and build head
voice.
By the way I cover all of this in my singing course.
You can check it out here, it’s called How To Sing Better Than Anyone Else, where literally
I break all of this stuff down for you guys, where it’s step by step by step, that can
train all of this stuff for you guys to help you build a robust, super-powerful head voice:
“HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!”
Like, you can Kill it, right?
And you can then translate that on down into chest, and then any kind of variation or derivation
or percentage thereof in mixed voice.
Alright!
Now, we did EE.
Now we want to do…
I’m sorry, we did EE and Ooh.
We want to do AH.
And Ah is a little tricky, because “AH” you want to have the throat wide open, and
because it’s a bigger vowel, it’s a little harder to manage up top.
So, we’re going to go… we’re going to be real, kinda ginger on the sound.
“LAAAAAAH, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah” “LAAAAAAH, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah”
Now.
Remember.
Ping is King.
Remember that really bright, timbral sound.
Remember that the doctor wants to see your tonsils.
Remember the yawning sensation.
Remember strength from the abdomen.
“LAAAAAAH, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah”
Now ladies, if you want, you can start this even higher, but this is a pretty good mean
average of where you should start.
Guys, you could start up here too.
If it’s a little too high for you, you can kind of join in where you feel comfortable
enough, without strain, to join us down, you know maybe around a D or a C or something
like that to start to build that thing, the timbre, excuse me.
Now, one other really important thing is that as we’re building this, I start out real
gentle, Lah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah….
And if that’s all you have, it’s okay.
That’s how I started.
And then little by little you can lean into the sound a little bit more.
Lah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah….
Right?
Now, we also discussed vowel modifications, and it’s really important, because it’s
not just “AH” it’s how that "AH" is supposed to feel in the throat.
So I have a whole section in my singing course called "How To Sing Better Than Anyone Else"
where I cover all of these vowel modifications and how to get to the placement in the throat
to where you don’t feel like your kind of gagging on the vowel or you’re choking or
clamping down on the vowel.
Okay?
All right, guys!
I hope you enjoyed this, and we’ve got more coming your way!
Until next time…
Peace.
Out.