Category: Vocal Mechanics

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How to learn a song quickly

I was chatting with a few other teachers and some students recently about how to learn a song quickly and how I go about learning songs, as well as what the most effective method is.

Learning a song is a remarkably complex process. There’s the lyrics, the melody, the rhythm, the harmony, perhaps some ornamentation or some hidden complexities, and there’s the challenge of successfully putting all the components together, still sounding like you whilst still doing justice to the original piece (artistry). And that’s just if you’re wanting to SING the song… if you’re wanting to accompany yourself that can create a WHOLE raft of other issues.

For a moment, let’s park our discussion of the artistic. Let’s also not worry about whether we are trying to accompany ourselves on an instrument.

I’m talking about learning a song quickly (the technical) AND, at the same time), progressing towards the best tone you can deliver (the aesthetic). Interestingly, you CAN do both, if you know what you’re doing.

Here’s my process for assimilating a song.

INITIAL PRIMER


1) Find a version I like – The first step is obviously important to make sure you WANT to sing the song.

2) Listen to it 3 or 4 times without singing along with it or playing along with it.
The second time is important to do it uninterrupted. Give your brain the best chance to internalise the song and also not associate the song with the stress of getting bits wrong (this IS going to happen when learning songs so we don’t want to create that stress unnecessarily).

3) Listen to it 3 or 4 times whilst humming or singing gently along.
This is the next step, but make sure not to stop and start again, or try singing the bit you just heard but got wrong over anything bit. Let the song wash over you whilst you tentatively follow along.

4) Listen to it 3 or 4 times trying to sing gently along, but pause and rewind to figure out difficult bits.
Try to keep the flow going as much as possible, but make sure to stop and retrace your steps if you mess something up. The quality of tone and range is not important at this stage, but it IS a chance to check your work.

Now we’ve done that, it’s time for the next steps…

MAKE IT EASY TO SOUND GOOD AND SOUND LIKE YOU

Many great teachers have said to me “I’d rather have half the range, double the quality”. Many singers agree intellectually with this, but emotionally their ego gets in the way. But the truth is, this is sage advice – and we’ve got to go DOWN if we want to go UP.

4) LOWER THE KEY and practice the song til you can do the whole thing – I generally take it down to where the top notes are SUPER pedestrian. If you’re unaccustomed to this approach, whatever key you might initially take a song down to, you could probably take it down a key or two more. For female voices or lighter male voices this can often stick the lowest notes too low overall, but you can apply this process in reverse for just those portions of the song, or even change the melody to be workable even in that lowest key.

Once you’ve got this sounding good and like you (which is ludicrously easy to guarantee because of how much this should be sitting in your chest voice, the place where you speak), we can start to change the key.

NOTE: This is working with the assumption that you have some level of functional mix going on. If you try following the next instructions without a functional mix, you will just end up straining or struggling with your voice.

That caveat aside, the next step is:

5) Take the key up ONE semitone, and repeat the process – Yup, just one singular solitary semitone, and make sure it sounds EXACTLY the same as the key before. Any strain, volume increases/drops, vowel changes etc all need ironing out at the next key. Other than the intellectual knowledge that it’s a higher key, the sound of your voice when singing in this key should be indistinguishable from the one before it.

6) REPEAT – Take it up another semitone, and repeat the process. You must make sure that each time you change key it exactly matches the one before. Even the slightest deviation from the sound that was delivered previously will yield an undesirable runaway process in how good the voice sounds as we ascend. Be incredibly picky about whether it’s the same or not, your voice will sound all the better for it and you’ll develop a LOT quicker overall as a singer.

The first key or two shouldn’t take too long nor be too difficult to do in the first instance. But once you get maybe 2 keys or so higher than your original comfortable key, you’ll start to find the hard work begins. You’ll find it reeeally hard to keep the volume the same, you’ll find vowels start to slip, either getting wider or getting much narrower than you’d like. You’ll find it more energy-intensive to sustain and you’ll need more rest breaks. Assuming you’ve got a functional mix and are adjusting correcting, this is normal and to be expected.

WHY DOES THIS WORK?

What this does is the tone-matching we talked about in my earlier article. We are putting our voice solidly in our modal register (our chest voice) where we are recognisably ‘us’, and then making DAMN sure we don’t lose that as we ascend. Singers all too often and far too willingly sacrifice quality and ease of production JUST to say they’ve hit the note… what’s frustrating for me as a voice teacher is not the sound they got (hey, sometimes it DOES sound cool!) but the sound they DIDN’T get.

Eh? The sound they DIDN’T get?

Once you’ve heard a true powerful voice that’s been built bit by bit in the manner described above, you cannot UNHEAR it. It changes you. It’s an ENORMOUS sound, like getting hit in the head by a freight train, all because of the way the voice has been built… and yet it’s not killing the singer to sing in that way, nor has it compromised ease or consistency to achieve that sound. So when I hear a singer that even sounds good before this approach, it makes me sad to think I could’ve heard something even MORE impressive.

IMPORTANT RULE OF WHEN TO STOP

7) When you can’t keep the same tonality as the key before, you stop.

This tells you where you are technically with your voice and with the song. You should not care too deeply about where the original singer put the song. We all have different voices in different stages of development and with different attributes and attitudes.

THE REAL PAYOFFS

What I love about this process is it reveals the BEST of your voice throughout – why? Because it starts in your TRUE voice, your speaking voice, and goes from there. This process has an in-built safety to prevent you compromising on that.

What is ALSO brilliant about this process is that you will have made sure you sound good in EVERY key you visited (other than the last). Which means that you are comfortable singing in every key you visited.

This in turn means you are psychologically singing much closer to the concept of mix – the idea of the sound of your true voice everywhere, with no reach, strain, stress, or deviation in the correct vowels.

MY PERSONAL OPINION AND FINDINGS

In my experience, voices expand exponentially when they follow this approach. They learn songs ludicrously quickly, and their voices start to sound impossibly enormous in terms of their tone (even without being loud). Once you hear this, you can’t unhear it, but best of all, it helps you to learn songs quickly AND sound great on them at each stage.

That’s it for now folks. Any questions, just let me know!

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Creating a great Mix: Tone-matching

Creating a great Mix: Tone-matching in another musical world

In the guitar world, tube amplifiers (the very first kind of amps for guitar that were ever created) have been the sought after tone machines for guitarists.

The issues with valve/tube amps are that they are heavy, too loud when delivering a great tone, require increasingly expensive maintenance, etc. As such, despite sounding great, with the advent of digital technology being so powerful now, people have long been trying to recreate the sound of tube amplifiers in digital products – these are often referred to as ‘modellers’ as they are trying to recreate a working digital model of an existing amplifier. The advantage of this is that the devices are much smaller, work at any volume level, and virtually no maintenance costs.

Nowadays there are products that can do live tone-matching with an existing tube amplifier. What this entails is that the modelling system is hooked up to an existing amplifier and it runs various listening diagnostics to the amplifier to try and mimic the amp as closely as possible, in terms of tone, feel, etc.

This is super-important that the digital model not just sound the same as the original amp, but that the model FEELS the same as the original, as the closer all those factors are to the original, the less of a discrepancy there is in the digital model from the original amp… thus rather than creating something that elicits the response of “oh, that’s a convincing copy”… people are left completely unaware they are even listening to something other than the original – the tone-matched model and the original amp sound become essentially one and the same thing.

What has this got to do with singing?

We’ve talked a lot about chest voice in previous articles (because a solid established TRUE chest voice is of critical importance in building a voice).

Take this tone-matching analogy in guitar amps. What they are trying to do is take something that sounds a beautiful way NATURALLY, and try to emulate that in a domain that does NOT naturally sound that way. It does so incrementally and repeat efforts to tone-match helps refine that sound.

In the same way, once the true chest voice of a given singer is established in that singer, we have the “original” sound that we are looking to recreate everywhere in the voice. Our goal is therefore to tone-match that sound as we develop the functional ability to move through the rest of our voice and our bridges. We develop functional ability to move through the voice first, but increasingly tone-match note by note from chest through the start of the bridge and upwards, making sure that each ascending note matches the one before it, both in terms of tone and feel (and certainly control of volume, though that takes time). If even one note is not matched to the extent given above, the consistency of the mix is lost.

The better the tone-match as we progress through the voice, the better the sound… AND the feel. For everyone involved as well! For the singer, for the audience, for everyone. Once you can start to tone-match your upper register to your true chest voice, high notes stop SOUNDING or even feeling that high. Of course their pitches are still high in an absolute sense, but the lack of reach, the evenness of timbre, the fact that the notes still sound like chest means we are psychologically trained to recognise the sound as chest and therefore we “feel” like those notes are in a comfortable range (as both singers and listeners).

This is huge

THIS is one key attribute of developing a great mix. Once the chest voice is established appropriately, tone-matching that quality throughout the range is what breeds a solid, powerful and expressive, mix. And few ever take the time to get that granular about their voice and any mix that may be established.

Any questions? Probably, as it’s quite a complex topic that I’ve tried to boil down into a simple analogy. But if you do have them, just post them below and I’ll be happy to update this article or chip in.

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Contraction and Release

OK, this one is going to be a little different.

DISCLAIMER:
What is about to follow builds on concepts of bridging, registration, and the tendencies that different singers have. If these terms are unfamiliar to you, or if you’ve not read the various articles on my site on bridges and the various vocal tendencies, please do have a search for these before continuing.

With that disclaimer done, let’s dive in.

The trouble with just EXCLUSIVELY registrating a voice…

One of the most amazing things about the technique we use in sessions is that it respects the idea of bridges or passageways in the voice. These passages connect different register in the voice (chest to head, super head, whistle register, etc). When a voice is able to navigate these without strain or loss of connection, we can say that this voice is “registrated” or is registrating well. The voice (and singer) is able to transition through each of these registers unimpinged by strain or by letting go into a lighter inconsistent sound.

The trouble with this approach is that many singers think that just the ability to move smoothly through the registers of their voices automatically makes them great singers. And I would have definitely been one of them in the past. BUT! The act of smooth registration is only a fraction of the battle… it starts the journey, and will always remain critical, but the rest of the journey involves the incredibly fine balance of contraction and release.

Here’s a way to break it down.

Contraction

To sing high notes the vocal cords need to stretch and thin. To sing low notes they need to contract and thicken. There is therefore a level of contraction in the cords that contributes towards the perceived tone generated by them. We need this contraction.

With the pull/high layrnx tendency, there is an overactivity in muscular contraction. Sometimes extrinsic (outside the vocal cords, e.g. surrounding muscular) but often within the larynx (e.g. the vocal cords and operational musculature themselves). Contraction is necessary, but too much causes stress and strain, and is bad.

With the light/no chest tendency, there is an an underactivity in muscular contraction. Excess contraction isn’t good, but neither is an underactive level of contraction. Too much is bad, too little is bad too.

With the flip/falsetto tendency, there is an inconsistency in muscular contraction. As before, excess is bad, too little is bad, and an inconsistent amount isn’t helpful either. Too much is bad, too little is bad, aaaaand inconsistent amounts are bad as well.

So we need the right amount of contraction in the cords?

Yes… but it’s a little bit more complex than even that.

Release

Release is the idea of a voice being free to access different registers. E.g. rather than reaching a Bb through the second bridge but holding onto a little bit too much of the passage before, the singer reaches it with no strain and no holding onto what went before. This CAN sound overly heady (in this example) but the sound is clearly heard to be free of strain and manipulation. This is good, for establishing initial ease of registration.

This idea of release is key for accessing upper registers and blending the voice. It’s a key component in registration… initially, and at every stage of development. We should ALWAYS be releasing into the next register of our voice, not pulling or straining. Release, like contraction, is necessary.

In the pull/high layrnx tendency, there is an insufficient amount of release. This is evident from our description above. Too little is obviously bad.

In the light/no chest tendency, there is too much release, hitting head voice too early (though slightly different due to the nature of underactive contraction – but this is helpful for our point). Too little release is bad, too much release isn’t great either.

In the flip/falsetto tendency, there is an inconsistent level of release. There may be no strain during the flip, but it is a sign of lack of co-ordination. Too little release is bad, too much release is bad, aaaaand an inconsistent amount is also bad.

So we need JUST the right of each… what IS that right amount?

To answer that, we need to revisit something we’ve talked about before.

Comparison with chest voice

In my post about singing starting and ending with chest voice, everyone (no matter how trained they are in singing) is comparing the sound of your voice up high (or anywhere else) to the sound of your natural speaking voice. That’s just the reality of it. Ergo, when they hear you singing high, they want to hear something congruent with chest voice.

But we can’t make it sound exactly like chest voice, because we need release into the upper registers… to do otherwise would just be straining and have insufficient release.

But we also can’t just completely release, because that would just be incredibly heady and incongruent with chest voice… to do so would be too light and have insufficent contraction.

Do you see?

We need BOTH. In a measure that balances one against the other. More than just merely “balanced” enough to registrate, or even just to feel like we can hit all the notes, we are talking about finding out how MUCH contraction the chest register on its own can deliver (forte, loud singing), and then making sure we can accompany a congruent amount of contraction in the upper registers… WITH the necessary amount of release to complement that level of contraction.

We need to know we can achieve that level of contraction everywhere in the voice, but once we are in the upper registers, a greater amount of release is progressively required to enable those notes to be sung well. Both parts must be there in appropriate (but not necessarily equal) measure. It’s not a one-size-fits-all balance, it’s unique to each voice.

NOTE: Not that we should always be singing super-loud, but it’s this multi-dimensional approach to bridging and registrating the voice that is needed to REEEEALLY build a voice.

In short…

…bridging is only half the battle. Bridging AT volume is the next part. This requires appropriate parts contraction AND release for any given voice, in order to give the voice access to all of it’s registers in a congruent way that the singer can also engage with.

Wipe the sweat off your brow!

I KNOW this is heavy stuff folks, but it’s something that once you “get”, you’ll be amazed you didn’t think like this before.

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Muscle Memory and Singing

Muscle memory is a big topic, and we’ll only be scratching the surface of it here today, specifically in relation to practice and vocal development.

Those of you who know me, know I tend to ask a lot of questions. Ever since I was a kid I would ask questions about things. I always wanted to know how things worked, what certain things were, and why things were the way they were.

I think that the power of the last question – why things are the way they are – is something that still fascinates me to this day. Things rarely happen for no reason. They might happen for reasons that are unclear to us, but they are rarely without causation.

There is a GREAT book on why things happen in the way that they do, called ‘Freakonomics’, and is a fabulous book on incentives and understanding the way people think and behave. It really sharpened and renewed my desire to understand the ‘why’ behind situations, as it is amazing what information you can glean when you always look to answer the question ‘why’.

So what’s the ‘why’ on my mind?

Something has come up a lot in the last few years is in relation to students that I work with. In particular, that there is a discernible difference between those that have lessons once a week (or more!) and those who have them once a fortnight (or less frequently)…

Once upon a time, I advised new students to have the first 3-5 lessons weekly so we can have the most impact on their voice, and then they are welcome to move to fortnightly lessons, as the convenience of fortnightly lessons works well for many. I still advise something similar…

But I noticed something. I noticed a HUGE difference between those who had lessons EVERY week without fail, and those who had them fortnightly without fail. Surely the difference is that those who have them weekly are twice as good as those who have them fortnightly? They have them twice as often, so they get twice as good… right?

WRONG

They were three, four, five times better. Sometimes even more so. The difference of having weekly lessons compounded their progress such that their development vastly outstripped the progress of those who were having lessons fortnightly. That’s even over those who were practicing diligently between fortnightly lessons.

This experience actually resulted in me completely re-engineering the way I run lessons, and the general recommendations I make when people start out working with me. The muscle memory these singers were creating was/is rock solid, and was developed incredibly quickly.

The majority of my clients do practice regularly, as you can hear the constant development in their voice lesson to lesson… however, those who have lessons weekly are dramatically overtaking those who have lessons less frequently. That’s not to say there are not big improvements across the board, but there is a substantial difference in quality of rate of development in the voices of those who are in weekly.

This is a combination of having regular contact time to work on and tweak the weekly exercise workouts for the student, and also because of the discipline that is clearly evident in those who make the time for weekly lessons.

So what’s your point here Mark?

My point is not to beat people up for not being in as often as once a week. My point is not to make people feel bad for not practicing as often as they feel they should. At the end of the day, everyone is different, and we don’t all have the time to work on our voices weekly with a teacher.

My point, if I am making any point at all, is that if you care deeply about something – such as your vocal development – then making regular weekly time for it is essential to develop that necessary muscle memory. I have seen bigger improvements in 3 months with some students who are in weekly, than I have in 12 months with those who are in less frequently. Again, that is not to say those who are in less frequently are not seeing big improvements, but we are seeing ENORMOUS improvements in those weekly students who commit the time in and out of lessons. It’s startling what that regular contact time can create in your voice.

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Worship Leader Vocal Training – How NOT to kill your voice and those of the congregation

I’ve written a few articles that cover how the voice is built in a particular way, as well as worship leader vocal training. As a result of the way the voice is built, putting songs in certain keys can really wreak havoc on the correct operation of the voice. It’s therefore important to put songs in a key that, aside from actually sounding good, are not killing people’s voices.

Now, the majority of artists or performers (whether professional or amateur) outside of the church or corporate singing (e.g. choirs) don’t have to worry about the keys of their songs causing other people to strain or hurt their voices. They put the song wherever they like, and people usually just listen, or mumble along or shout out their favourite lines. No big deal. However, within certain contexts, there are people whose roles mean that their key choice is forced on those around them…

Worship Leaders

One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered with students coming to me from a background of being a worship leader, or from singing in church, is heavily ingrained bad habits. These bad habits are reinforced by hours and hours of singing songs in keys that is not appropriate for their voice, or those around them.

There are bridges in the voices, passageways (if used correctly) that connect different parts of the voices together. Singing right on a bridge or one note either side of it is harder than singing in the ‘island’ between these bridges. This means, if you can sing a song where the top notes are ‘on’ one of your bridges, it will always be easier to sing and sound better if you sing the song in a key where the top notes are placed ‘away’ from your bridges.

For the average singer, particularly males, it is possible-to-probable that they have not learned to move through their first bridge yet, and so you cannot put the song in a key where the notes are higher than first bridge (E4) and expect them to find that easy or even doable… yet worship leaders worldwide insist on placing songs in keys where the top note IS E4 or just slightly higher. I have regularly played with in bands with worship leaders who insist this is where their voice sounds best and that the song ‘lacks something’ if it is not put in this key. They themselves pull, strain and push to get to those notes, and expect the same of the congregation. Except that they have a microphone and PA behind them, the congregants do not.

Moving a song away from one of your bridges can help with singability and tonal quality no end. For example, if there is a song with a single top note of E4 in the key of E, simply moving it to the key of D places that single top note away from the bridge to D4. Or in another example, where the top note is a repeated or sustained top note, making it a C#4 or a C4 can make things soooo much easier for everyone.

This kind of approach makes songs much easier to sing and will actually make the worship leader AND congregation sound better, as the voice is more in balance and in less of a strained condition.

Not convinced? We’ve only looked at the issue of bridges affecting male singers. Let’s look at female singers.

Double or Quits

Many female singers find that they simply cannot sing men’s parts in the original octave, but also struggle to sing it in the octave above. They often revert to a harmony line, which allows them to sing somewhere in between the original octave and the upper one.

This is because if a top note is E4, the octave above is E5, which is right on their second bridge. This is tough. Even changing the key to make the top note D5 is still tough just because the higher you go, the more of a teetering tower of cards the voice can become without a decent level of vocal training. In such scenarios, placing the top note on a C#, C or B is recommended for women.

For the equivalent octave for men, this can sometimes feel a touch low, so I generally recommend D, C# or C as the top note. You can see there is a good deal of overlap there.

What’s wrong with harmony?

Absolutely nothing, but if people are having to change what they’re singing because the key isn’t sustainable for them, then I would argue the key is poorly chosen for corporate singing. I mentioned that female singers often revert to a harmony so as not to struggle with the melody. A harmony is just another melody that complements the original melody. It often closely mirrors the original melody.

What female singers learn to do is sing a harmony that sits more or less halfway between where two octaves of the melody would sit, i.e. if the top note is an E4 / E5 (depending on the octave), females often revert to around B4 to make it singable. This tells us a lot about the comfort zone of the female voice, and we would do well to take that into consideration.

So what do I suggest?

Worship leaders – if you get comments of ‘that was tough to sing’, if you find your own voice is shot after just a few songs, if you find that people drop out for the high notes or women are reverting to harmonies out of comfort, then you are killing people’s voices, including your own. Find better keys for your keys and you will find that people become far less distracted by the discomfort in their own throat during a worship time, and you’ll ALSO start getting a LOT more compliments on how good you sound.

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It All Starts And Ends With Chest Voice, Part 1

I have regular lessons myself, (because all voice coaches should be having regular ongoing lessons themselves, period – no-one knows everything, and we can all improve), and recently I have returned to regular study with Greg Enriquez. Greg is an extremely knowledgeable and incredibly experienced voice coach out in Las Vegas.

Greg is a longtime friend and student (both as a singer and a coach) of Seth Riggs. For those who don’t know, Seth is responsible for what is arguably the greatest revitalisation, rediscovering, and refocusing of voice technique in the 20th Century. So when Seth or Greg stop to talk about various concepts, quite frankly it’s worth your time to lose the ego and listen.

What I’m going to talk about here, is just one tiny slice of the stuff we’ve gone over in our sessions together.

One of the things that we’ve been looking is the importance of chest voice. The bottom end of the voice. The thing that beginner or under-confident singers often like to hide at the bottom of, and the thing that who think they are more advanced believe they’ve got sorted… and then forever seem to be running away from with every song in pursuit of high notes!

I know what you’re thinking “yea yea yea Mark, we GET that chest voice matters”… well, just hold your horses, because there’s even MORE to it than we’ve discussed thus far.

So critical is the role of chest voice in full and total development of the voice, that it would not be overstating it to say that when it comes to vocal technique and overall development…

“It all starts and ends with chest voice”

OK Mark, that’s a little dramatic.

Maybe. But so massive is the concept that we’re talking about here, that there’s no way I can do it all in one blog post. I’m going to break it up into three components that (I think) reflect the importance of chest voice.

1. “It all starts and ends with chest voice… sonically”

2. “It all starts and ends with chest voice… technically”

3. “It all starts and ends with chest voice… psychologically”

By the end of this series, you should have a clearer understanding of why your chest voice should NOT be neglected, and how understanding it is the key to unlocking great tone in every other area of your voice.

And today, we’re going to start with part 1…

“It all starts and ends with chest voice… sonically”

What do I mean by this?

Put simply, we are all “experts” or at the very least we are “experienced” when it comes to hearing other people’s voices. How so? We have been listening to people speak since the day we were born.

We hear fellow human beings speak in their normal speaking voices every single day. Some people having higher voices, some people having lower voices, but we all get used to hearing people speak. And where does everyone speak for the bulk of the day? Their chest voice.

Thus, we can argue we are all (at least on some level) experts in what people are supposed to sound like – what sounds good and normal, and what doesn’t… just by way of pure experience.

Unconscious Benchmark

Even if we don’t realise it, this creates an unconscious sonic benchmark in our own minds for what constitutes a “normal” or pleasing sounding voice, or whether we think a given voice wrong, weird, or just sounds out of place. This applies to both others and ourselves, because we so innately recognise the sound of chest voice.

Now, we should obviously clarify that though most people often can’t articulate why something is out of place, or they may even sometimes struggle to point out that something IS out of place, if they hear someone speaking/singing in a way that isn’t congruent with their unconscious benchmark, they will certainly FEEL like something isn’t adding up… and in the world of singing, that’s all that really matters.

Why is this such a big deal?

We’ve all got the quality of chest voice locked into our ears, our brains, our very psyches. It’s not that we don’t WANT to hear higher notes, nor that singing ONLY in chest voice is bad or good… I’m not trying to make such a sweeping statement. Instead, the point I’m making is simply that this idea of always hearing people speak in chest voice creates a sonic benchmark in people’s minds and ears for what constitutes an aesthetically pleasing and tonally consistent voice. We are ultimately judging singers based on whether their voice sounds congruent with our sonic benchmark of chest voice… more specifically, their chest voice.

Let’s take this example…

When we hear someone who goes to sing a high note, and it suddenly goes incredibly light, or it starts to become very shouty in quality, it sounds off and there’s a disconnect with the audience. Why? Because the sound has deviated from the benchmark in our minds. We don’t like it as much as someone that sounds like they’ve stuck to the same vocal quality throughout.

So why is it that some people can sing relatively high without it ever sounding like they are going that high? Well, they aren’t doing anything magical per se, they are simply playing by the rules of our own sonic benchmarks. They’ve made damn sure that when they hit a high note, it is congruent and consistent with their chest voice as you would hear it.

It’s about congruency, consistency, uniformity with chest voice. We are all consciously excited by high notes, but we are all mentally set up to look for consistency with chest voice – we can’t escape this.

It all starts and ends with chest voice
Irrespective of what arguments singers who want to sing high can make, once you depart from the true quality of someone’s natural chest voice, you’ve already lost… you’ve lost the quality, lost the tonal connection, AND lost the connection with the audience.

The overriding message here is not to compromise your chest voice just to get to the high notes. Those high notes are nothing without the bottom ones to ground them and impart depth. The results of approaching the voice in this way are totally worth it.

You can find part 2 right here…

Learn More: Related Articles

If you want to learn more about vocal technique and great singing, you may enjoy these related articles:
The Difference between Amateurs and Pros
The problem with trying to teach voice using ONLY voice science
Vocal Pedagogy: Past, present and future
Singers: The Difference Between Vocalists and Performers
Can vocal technique help laryngitis?
Vocal Tessitura: What is it?
What is vocal fach?
The Key to Vocal Consistency