hey chris liepe here with how to thicken your mixed voice and i'm going to give you three
exercises to help you bring your chest up and keep your mix from sounding thin which is a huge
complaint from a lot of people whether you've been singing in mix for a while or whether you're just
starting
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you
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voice course all right thickening your mix i've probably heard i don't know how many people
say hey bring more chest into that mix or hey can you bring a bit more chest voice
into your high voice i've heard people say this and i think i've even said it
and i got to thinking about it and i don't know how helpful that command
or that suggestion is because unless we know how it feels to bring more chest into our mix
we can't really do that as a matter of fact part of the reason we're pursuing mix
is so that we don't have to be dependent on our chest voice or solely on our chest voice and so
the suggestion hey hey make that a bit more chesty if you don't know how that's supposed to feel
you can't possibly take that advice so the first exercise we're going to be working with is to
connect that phrase or that suggestion hey make it a bit chestier of a mix or bring a little bit more
chest or bring your chest up to take that command and experiment with how it feels so first do this
huh we're going to be really chesty by going
that sound we start off with an h and then we grab the note with our vocal chords but there's
something going on with that h if we're doing it right yeah we're adding compression even in the
midst of that h to make it a loud h this isn't a this is our false cord area is grabbing that
that air before we start with the uh uh part adding some compression before we start phonating
or before we start singing i play fast and loose with the phrase or with the word singing over that
but do this a few times and do it in different parts of your range
then we want to make an observation when i go
there's a bit of an old man vibe going on like this oh okay
now if i stick to that posture that vocal positioning
and try to move it around musically at all it's not very useful at all
hey there's ways that we can reposition to go higher but for the purposes of this exercise
we're going to create an alternate sound and therefore feel and it's going to help connect
that thin mix that some of us have already discovered if you need more help with your mixed
voice i've done a lot of videos on the channel on this so i encourage you to browse those other
videos as well but let's take our who and let's make it an e he he he but instead of that sound
we're gonna transition to he he and we're gonna make it very bright and very nasal we still have
that h helping us he he he he my larynx is higher he i'm letting air go through my nose he he he he
experiment with that placement a bit more so we go from hoo to hee he then we're going to peg
some arbitrary head voice note that feels fairly high but not too high and we're going to say ah
like that ah let it slide down a little bit ah ah so we've got three sounds we've got
we've got he and oh
now i want to make some observations about this note oh this is head voice this is not
mix this is not a push note like you've seen me done do in other videos
not that yet we're just going to go head voice only
notice there's an h there as well
it's not as pronounced but there's still an h now we're going to trick our muscles into accessing
mix and eventually a thicker mix by combining some of these sounds okay we're going to go
so we've combined our head voice note with the we've started with the and as we get
that positioning right as we go into and we have that super compressed tense feeling we throw our
voice into head voice and you notice when i did that i sounded much crowier and that head voice
note sounded thicker because i was looking and feeling out what my body was doing during the
and carrying that carrying that that feel into my head voice ah ah
it's immediately thicker than head voice
we have thin mix now i'm doing this fairly quickly this is gonna take you some time of going
of experimenting with this quite a bit but keep leaning into it don't expect this to
happen instantly take this exercise and run with it for a little bit okay
next we're going to incorporate the he he hey the goal here
is we want to create a middle pitch we're not going for notes but a middle pitch between
and then he somewhere in there but we want it to be initially kind of cracky and unsettled
we just want it to be in between pitch wise okay so let me get there for you
you hear the difference in timbre that's happening i'm going to do it a bunch more times
there's a little bit of uneasiness and crackiness there if i can retain the initial
that feeling and you feel it here you feel it a little bit high here you shouldn't feel
a tense neck it should feel like you're pushing a lot from your primary support
yes like you're lifting something heavy like i've talked about before but because we're adding that
compression and getting that that positioning down before we phonate and then pushing up into our
head voice and then going down into our middle area and then being intentionally super nasal
if we do this enough we're going to observe the blending we're going to observe the bringing up
of our chest because we've harnessed the feeling we're going higher into a more off limits area and
then we're settling in the middle here we go i'm gonna do this a bunch of times it's gonna be ugly
it should be and then i'm gonna gradually move it into stuff that sounds a little cooler
hi yes i'm doing this on one breath it's important to do that if you don't have your
support dialed in and join my free voice course if you haven't if you don't have your support
dialed in this is going to be really difficult to do you're going to spend too much breath he
now i want to observe this break when i feel myself teetering on that break when i go to hee
like that i'm going to call on the feel of huh a bit more and push into it i'm going to bring that
world into the he again we're not trying to hit notes we're not trying to be pretty we're trying
to find that when we go to the he and we start breaking into a definitive chest if i add a bit
more push and a bit more nasality i'm going to feel the freedom to bring that break into balance
a little bit it's not going to be so much of a break as it is going to be a an ugly like that
he
now right there i started to tighten it up there was less of a break going on
and more of a a weird wine ha hee
that's a nasal thicker sound let's rest in this a bit
now it's hard when i'm at the end of my breath to get it so i have to retain that positioning
okay got it on full breath
now i'm gonna move around a little bit with pitch with this positioning
what we're really doing in this whole group of exercises is we are tricking our body to using
compression in other areas in other resonances other than our chest voice because a good thick
mix incorporates a lot of compression but the biggest problem people have is once they get this
compression thing down in their chest voice they can't seem to work on the feel to get compression
in their head and mix which is why we develop a nice thick chest compressed voice and then we
go to head voice or try to go to some semblance of mix it sounds thin that contrast is too great
believe me when i say that we have to be willing to rest in this very ugly donkey sound area for a
while as we're feeling out how compression feels in different parts of our voice in different
resonances but as we do this over time it's going to create the ability to oh yeah okay i
know how to moderate the feeling of compression as i'm going in and out of different resonances
and the soundgarden song that i did part of at the beginning of this lesson
is a great goal to get to because he's constantly going from thick mix down into chests and using
compression and it's that he's living right there in that tough area easy to sing high mix stuff
hard to sing mid mix stuff and have it be consistent enough yet still
eruptive enough so now i'm going to take what we've done here
i'm going to practice over the track i'm gonna bring these things together
in a musical way so that you can see that after a little bit of experimenting you're
not gonna be that far off you're also going to notice after some time and as you start getting
into more musical contexts even though your voice doesn't feel musical or sound musical that that
is going to get thicker and thicker by using these three things the goal isn't necessarily to make
pretty the goal is to realize the range using as the sort of con connectivity but you're
going to notice all sorts of fun things about the and the ha as well here we go
me
he
that was a good huh take a break
oh ah
oh
so let me make a couple observations about what i just did and how i feel now i definitely had
to watch the light-headed nature because we're blowing a lot of air we have to
practice vocal budgeting and listening to our uh body if we start getting light-headed but
also if we start getting too tired but as i worked on the hoo that positioning and as i
threw it up into the head voice with the anticipation of going down to the lower he
something about that motion created a higher thicker head voice actually it was a thicker mix
note on the ha the he was ugly a lot but the ha sounded kept sounding better and kept
feeling better this is really neat and important to observe the middle of the exercise that ha
is where we discover the feeling in anticipation of the e the he
it's where we feel the sensation of bringing the chest up make sure you are
paying attention to that as you're doing this thanks so much for rolling with me in this lesson
again if you'd like more help with your own voice click the link below and join my free voice course
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