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.
How to belt.
Kind of funny, I actually have had a lot of people that coined me as the king of belt.
I wasn’t coined as the King of Pop, apparently, but I was coined the king of belt, so hopefully
I have some insights I can share with you guys on the subject.
Well, with that said, belting is not everything that it seems to be, and here’s what I mean.
The term comes from the Broadway Belt, or way back in Broadway when they would come
out and they would sing something and it was called the call register, or the shouting
or belting register, right?
Now, it’s kind of ironic too, that other people say oh, man it just sounds like you’re
shouting at me!
Well, that’s actually what belting is, you know, you’ve gotta, you are belting in a
really loud registration, and you have to figure out a way to control the air, have
good support, and a relaxation response that enables you to do this safely, without losing
your voice.
Right?
So what we do is we do a number of exercises, at a reasonable volume, not too loud, in order
to be able to grow our chest resonant, or our call registration, in order to be able
to project, and project loudly.
Now this is where resonance comes in, again, I use this term resonance because it’s very
important.
If you can grow the voice correctly, or grow good vowel placement, with a lot of good exercises,
and I see coaches say the craziest things.
You don’t need to do, scales are counter productive, and like all this stuff.
Guys…!
That’s so silly…
That’s like saying I want to become an athlete, but I don’t have to work out.
They're counter productive.
Or I’m just going to go out and play!
Well, how many amazing sports athletes do you think go out and just show up for the
game, and have been never trained or had to practice this stuff?
That’s just nonsense!
It’s a sales technique tactic to try to say take the pill to lose weight.
You don’t have to exercise, just take this pill I’m gonna give you, and for $9.95 a month
for the rest of your life and you’re going to look awesome!
No!
We’ve gotta eat right.
We’ve gotta get sleep.
We’ve gotta exercise.
We’ve got to do smart things that we know to be true, that are rational and not irrational
from someone that’s on some hyped out sort of thing.
So anyway, getting back, sorry, it’s my soapbox.
Stuff like this just annoys me.
As we go on to how to belt, I want to emphasize a couple of things.
There’s a lot of ways to belt things, and some people’s versions of belting might
be different than others.
So, some guy might go ”Oh, whoah” and he thinks that’s belting, because he raised
his voice.
Other people might go “YEAH!!!”
You know, And that’s their version of belting, so that there’s some extremes in this.
And, there’s some gray area, there’s some shades in between.
One or the other isn’t necessarily right or wrong, it’s just that we move into the
call register.
So now, let me emphasize this.
So I’ll grab my guitar here for a second, and let’s just do a quick triad ah vowel
scale, and I’ll show you what I mean.
Now, because it’s called the call register, I want you to envision yourself to calling
out to someone.
Now I want to, I even kind of created an extreme example of this, because this is especially
for the ladies.
Because a lot of girls out there, especially sopranos, roll into their head voice way too
early, and they go “ehhhhhh” and they kind of roll into this head voice thing, and
they never develop their chest resonant sound, or their call register, okay?
Now, this is important too, because what’s happened over time, I talk a lot about bel
canto and Opera and Appoggio and how this plays into this role of where a lot of teachers
have trained a lot of people in kind of funky ways, and this is all the way from University
level, a personal coach instruction level, and, and, and…
So ladies I’m talking to you right now.
The belting register was sacrificed at the altar of the high note.
Let me say that again.
The belting, mid voice belting register, for you sopranos, was sacrificed at the altar
of that all-powerful, moneymaking high note.
So, maestros and conductors and whatnot, and vocal trainers and coaches would not develop
the mid voice at all.
Their goal was only the grand finale of the night, to get a “AAAAAAH!”
You know, that big old note, you know, okay, that’s the money note, that’s what I’m
getting paid for, that’s where the audience claps, and everyone goes home, and the curtains
go in, and everyone says “Yay!
What a wonderful, you know, production that was!”
So, because they sacrificed that, a lot of women that were sopranos were taught to go
into head voice early, and then go up and do these notes, but they were never taught
how to bring this belting register into their repertoire.
So for you ladies I want to emphasize that I want you to envision something extreme like
someone stealing your purse.
You’re at a restaurant, and you see your purse three tables over, and the thief comes
over and grabs the purse, and you go
“HEY!!! STOP!!! THEIF!!!
THAT’S MY PURSE!!!
STOP THAT GUY!!!”right?
OR, someone stealing your car, or for you younger people out there someone stealing
your bike.
“HEY, THAT’S MY BIKE!!!”
I want you to really, Now, we’re not going to overdo this, and go “Hey, hey, hey!”
And kill ourselves, because there’s some exercises that we do, through open throat technique.
Now I cover all of this in my singing course called How To Sing Better Than Anyone Else,
where I walk you through this step-by-step on how to safely grow this.
We don’t go straight to shouting.
We don’t go straight to yelling.
You’re just going to go hoarse.
Think about yelling at a football game or something.
You’re just, okay I yelled at a football game, now I’m hoarse, Ken.
Now what do I do?
No, we work up to this like were working out at a gym, we work up to these things.
The same is true for you, guys.
And, by the way, this also really true for a newer generation of a lot of the R and B
guys that roll into their head voice really early, and then gutted out their mid voice,
their belting register mid voice.
So they’ve completely lost the manliness so to speak, in this sense, of this belting
or or call, or nice firm, strong registration, okay?
So, what I want to do is, gals, you can take this up the octave, you know you contaltos,
altos, and sopranos.
Guys, you just do this down here with me.
On an ah vowel, I want a really nice, bright ping!
AHH!!!
I want a strongly supported diaphragm, if you don’t know what that means, watch my
video on diaphragmatic support.
We’re going to support the breath.
Now, for you that, I don’t know if we’re going to release these, or what order we’re
going to release these videos I’m putting out right now, but I just did a video on compression,
and if it’s not out yet, maybe I’ll try to make sure to release this one after so
you can watch the video on compression first and then refer to this one, how to belt.
But we want to compress the air with a nice bright ping.
So ,”LAH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH…”
Just a simple triad.
”LAH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH…”
Now, for you baritones, you’re going to start to feel a tug.
And the tug is going from your speaking register like I’m talking to you now, into transitioning
into this call belting register.
And I almost want to feel like a gearshift.
And here’s what I mean by that.
It will feel like there’s so much girth, or mass in the throat, that you couldn’t
possibly think of imagine sustaining going up higher and higher, because it’s building
up more and more tension.
Well, I like to think of this like a rocket ship.
And we’ve got three stages to the rocket ship.
We’ve got the big module down below, which is our speaking register.
Okay?
We’ve got the second stage, which is module number two, which is our call register.
And we’ve got the top stage, or the third stage.
We should probably do it the other way around and do 123, let’s reverse that and go 321.
So three is the speaking register, two is the call register, and one is your head voice
or connecting passaggio register.
So as we start to ascend, we pare down the sound and make it smaller, and we let that stage,
or module fall away.
And then what we have left are the two stages.
And as we go up even higher, if we want to go “AYYYYYYYYE” we want to go through
that passaggio, way up into head voice, we let that second stage fall away, and all that’s
left is stage I.
And then on the way back down, we reconnect those modules so that they can, you know, re-dock,
so to speak, on the way back down, so we go back and regain all of that wonderful warmth
that we have for our low registration.
So again, so as I’m going higher
“LAH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH!”
Right here I’m getting that shift.
If you notice, I’m not “LAH, AH, AH, HAH!”
I’m not real big on the sound.
I’m thinning it out and paring it down and the higher up I go.
Now, that doesn’t mean to make it thin, and wiry, and harsh, and shrill, and brash.
That’s not my point.
In my course, I cover how we take our vowel sounds, and we miniaturize them.
Kind of like the difference between playing golf on a big course, and then playing miniature
golf.
We play a smaller game up top, and we have the vocal tract, which is your throat, we
have the shape of the vowels be the same as they were on the bottom.
As far as the color and the bigness, we just make them smaller, and as we make them smaller
they're more manageable, and we’re not dragging all this weight and girth up into the throat
as we continue to ascend.
“LAH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH!”
Right?
So if you notice that, instead of doing down here “LAH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH!”
How big I was on the sound?
Now listen up here “LAH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH, AH!”
Hear how small I am?
So I’m pitching the sound a little forward, I’m bringing a little mask into the sound,
I’m controlling the vowels, I’ve got good support, and I’ve got good vowel placement,
and we learn about vowel modifications and how these vowel modifications play a role
in this.
So now, when I go to belt, “Yeah, Yeah, Yah!”
“Yeah, Yeah!”
“Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!”
Right?
I can get into a smaller space, and I’m actually kind of deceiving you a little bit,
because I’m making you think that I’m just killing it, singing it really loud, when
in fact I’m using resonance, or allowing the resonance that I built over time, in the
gym when I worked out, I built up some muscles, and I’m letting that do my work for me,
rather than trying to kill you with so much overuse of air and girth and mass in the throat,
okay?
I hope this was beneficial to you guys.
Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy.
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And until next time, peace.
Out.