Head Voice vs Falsetto: What's the Difference?

what up guys it's your boy matt from ramsayvoice.com i am so excited about our topic today today we are going to be talking about the difference between head voice and falsetto this is confused singers for so so long it is totally silly because as soon as you understand a little bit of the difference between head voice and falsetto you're immediately going to get it and then we need to just start developing both of those different sounds in your voice now you're going to get three main things out of watching this video number one you're going to learn what is the difference between head voice and falsetto with the definition for each you're also going to learn to recognize them whenever you hear them in songs and three i'm going to give you two fantastic exercises to help you find and refine your falsetto into your head voice if that's a problem or otherwise you know you can always work backwards from a full head voice to a falsetto as we will soon see now if you guys find this video helpful make sure that you hit like comment with the next kind of video that you want to see me react to things and thoughts that you had about this particular video how it could be better i'm reading them all i promise i cannot wait to see what you guys have to say and make sure that you subscribe and turn on notifications for this channel or if you want a complete singing course that's going to take you through everything and a whole lot more that i'm going to take you through today check out my complete singing course master your voice okay now that that's out of the way let's talk about the difference between head voice and falsetto now head voice and falsetto like i said have confused singers for a really really long time and a lot of that has to do with like some of the ways that we're actually talking about head voice and falsetto between different styles of music in the old classical days falsetto was a reference to anything that was in the top part of the singer's voice so like even if i was singing like an a in what we would now think of as a head voice like an uh they would still call that my falsetto register so there's some confusion there because now modern techniques like sls and cvt and a bunch of these other techniques refer to those top parts of your voice as like a head voice or like a mixed voice so this can be very confusing but i'm going to eliminate that right now all you need to know is the difference between head voice and falsetto is basically how much the vocal folds or the vocal cords are closing now what i'm talking about is how thick or thin the vocal cords are themselves so when i'm talking about like how thick they are what i mean is like your vocal cords the way that they vibrate is it's kind of like my hands you've got one on each side and they come together and they have this little wave pattern and they do this hundreds and hundreds of times a second sometimes they do it as much as a thousand times per second like the high c like soprano c6 is like over a thousand times per second it's crazy so they're doing this a lot now the difference in sound quality that you get from a really really thick amount of closure like my entire hand is closing is what we hear in like chest voice so like an ah that's this kind of a sound that's that kind of a wave now the only thing that makes falsetto different is how much the vocal cords are actually closing so in this particular case it's kind of like the outer edges of the vocal cords are touching so rather than ah and be like oh [Music] it's just kind of like the outer edges so a big difference between chest voice and a lot of people's head voice is thick chords versus thin chords but the difference between specifically head voice and falsetto is with head voice rather than it being like an ah and just like bashing my chords together that's more of a belt instead i'm getting like part of the vocal cords to come together again not all of it just like a middle part of it and a lot of that has to do with how long the vocal cords are closing too but to keep it really simple just think chest voice really thick vocal cords head voice somewhat thick and falsetto as you probably guessed it is going to be the thinnest where it's just kind of like the outer edges like now i want to tell you something very important which is that i think that a lot of people get down on falsetto and they're like oh falsetto is like this bad thing or like head voice is the only way to go or like i only want to learn to sing in falsetto it doesn't matter guys these are all really really important vocal techniques to use in your voice because each one of them has a use each one of them you'll find in different genres of music and it's really important to kind of like be able to do both the only thing that i would say is there are a lot of people that will just sing in falsetto because they don't know how to actually sing in their head voice yet and that we do need to work on so if that's been an issue for you stick around because we're gonna fix that as well now before we jump into the exercises to help you improve your falsetto to get a stronger head voice to sing in more of a mixed voice whatever you want to call it everybody's looking for the same thing they're all looking for those strong beautiful full rich high notes i want to give you a couple of examples of like the differences between head voice and falsetto so falsetto for instance like has that trademark kind of like breathy fluty kind of a quality you can think of like reckoner by radiohead so that like it's just all airy it's just all very breathy red and there's not a whole lot of real voice there and you could oppose that to [Music] like so i'm singing my mixed voice there or a full head voice whatever it is that you want to call it you could also take a look at like a song like want you to want me like jason derulo just want to sleep i got the sheets on the floor nothing on me you can think of the bee geez staying alive staying alive now that's a little bit kind of like a twangy falsetto so it sounds a little bit fuller like a like a head voice would but it's still not and again like if you wanted to sing the derulo and more of the head voice start to sleep i got the sheets on the floor nothing on me there's just a little bit of a fuller kind of quality there you can also look at like skinny love by bony bear come on skinny love just last year you could call it like a mickey mouse voice you could call it pinocchio voice you could call it uh like whatever like it just sounds like false there's not a whole lot of real voice going on there and again that's just because of how much the vocal cords are closing the vocal cords are closing in like a more of a square pattern you get a fuller head voice sound and if it's just kind of the exterior edges of the vocal cords then you're going to get more of that kind of falsetto yeah kind of a sound and to look at the bonivera version you could say kind of like uh in more of a head voice come on skinny love just last a year now i want to point out something again there's nothing wrong with either one of those sounds i can totally agree that falsetto sounds way better in bonivera's songs than singing in a full head voice however there are a lot of songs you really really do want to learn with a full head voice on for instance like it would be kind of weird if i was saying like sam smith oh won't you stay with me it would just sound really silly and really like you know false like falsetto so instead you know you want to get that oh won't you stay with me you want that fuller kind of a head voice sound so if that's something that you've been struggling with i'm going to give you some great exercises to help you fix that right now now the first thing that you need to know before we jump into these exercises is there's two main reasons why somebody is going to go to falsetto in the first place i would say just to be overly simplistic here you can say that the first reason is because people are backing off too much oh won't you stay they're not actually pushing in a whole lot of real voice into that top note and that's why it's really flipping you could also say that another reason that a lot of people go to falsetto or a reason that they sing in falsetto rather than a full head voice is because they're pressing too hard oh won't you stay and then their voice flips into falsetto so again it's like they're kind of muscling up until they can't anymore so it's really important that you kind of understand which one applies to your voice and i'm actually going to give you some exercises to solve for each one of them so let's say that you're like backing off like a little too much in other words you're oh won't you stay you're just kind of giving up you're just letting it happen one thing that you can find that's really helpful is and you've probably seen this in my other videos is like a bratty kind of sound in this particular instance i'm going to give you a bratty name and i'm going to do it on an octave repeat scale this is a very very common scale you'll see this all the time but basically you're gonna walk up repeat the note four times and come back down guys i'm gonna go ahead and start off with you right here we're on an f sharp on top so it's gonna be like a nae [Music] [Music] now notice on none of those did i completely back off i focused on that bratty sound and what that bratty sound is doing in case you're curious is that bratty sound is basically bringing the vocal cords together so that they are closing a little bit tighter to go back to our example earlier of like square versus kind of like thin you could say that this brady sounds kind of in the middle it's thin ish it's thin enough to help you get up to the high note but it's also bringing the chords together tightly which allows it to sound a little bit less bratty and with enough time you can turn that [Music] that ugly sound into it [Music] but if that's hard for you right now do not panic do not worry just use that bratty sound for a little while and you'll be amazed at how much better it sounds let's go ahead and do the ladies now ladies we're going to start around in a4 so again walking up to the top note repeating it four times like this and again listen to how like buzzy and rich that sounds it's a lot better than a hey and again that's falsetto falsetto i cannot stress this enough a falsetto is pretty easy to do a full head voice together is pretty tough for a lot of people so if you're having a hard time do not despair start off by training your head voice first and then you'll be amazed at how easy it is to like back and forth between the two of them and you'll see a lot of singers do this quite often okay great now what if you're going to falsetto just because things are so tight things are so tense you're oh won't you stay and you just totally break and flip whenever you get to that top note if that's the case i want to give you another exercise that's also going to help you basically go from pushing things too hard too strainy to all of a sudden going to super light to kind of like more of like a middle in the middle so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna give you an octave and a half scale and again this one's just the octave and a half arpeggio you've heard it before if you haven't heard it it's pretty easy to memorize it's like a triple triple triple a triple it done and that'll be the same pattern that we repeat upwards but again if that's the problem that you've been having if you've been too tense we're going to do this on a ghee like you're saying the word geez and so a lot of people have a hard time with this at first don't worry do not worry just do it just like you're saying the word geeky geese gee ski ski so kind of like a kiki guys let's start right there we're on a b-flat on the bottom [Music] and again this is really important that you're not just [Music] squeezing into those top ones at the top just allow them go geez and just kind of allow that sound in like [Music] and you'll be amazed at how much better that gets now ladies let's do the same thing and f3 on the bottom for the ladies so it's going to be like [Music] tiki now you'll notice that even though that's in a pretty high key for my voice i'm singing up to a d5 up there i'm still singing it in full head voice i'm not hey and i'm not gay pressing too much i'm just and that is so important to begin developing that spot in your voice where it's like rather than going from like super thick vocal cords to like super thin vocal cords defining a place in the middle so that you can ah [Music] without any breaks or any strain without having to resort to falsetto the last thing that i want to say about that and i know i've said it before but i'm just going to say it again because i know a lot of people are going to leave me hate in the comments but there's nothing wrong with falsetto nothing wrong with it at all it's an absolutely fantastic sound and again there's lots of songs that i absolutely love that use it radiohead sings with it quite a bit jeff buckley sings with it quite a bit tons of great singers singing with falsetto however you want to make sure that you're not just going to falsetto because you don't know how to sing in head voice that's very self-limiting and why i say that is because like if you're starting to sing upwards like on an you're gonna hit a point where you literally cannot breathe any more air up there but if you sing it with more of a full head voice like an [Music] you can take that up pretty high in your voice because there's some connection there's some actual vocal cord being used there guys i hope you found this video really helpful do not forget to like comment with the next kind of video that you want to see me do subscribe turn on notifications for this channel for lots of other great singing tutorial stuff and i will see you guys next time

Channel: Ramsey Voice Studio

Views: 15,730

Rating: 4.9397259 out of 5

Keywords: vocal coach, ramsey voice studio, singing exercises, singing warm ups, Matt Ramsey, Singing Lessons, Voice Lessons, How to Sing, Falsetto, Head Voice, How to Sing Falsetto, How to Sing Head Voice, falsetto vs head voice, what’s the difference between head voice and falsetto, sing high notes, Free online voice lessons, falsetto exercises, head voice singing, head voice warm ups, how to use head voice, how to sing in head voice, strengthen head voice, head voice exercises

Id: zapRDCPrqsw

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020