How to Belt High Notes Without Strain (Pull Chest OR use Mixed Voice?)

what's up guys i'm gregory west and this video is all about singing loud high with power and fullness not thinning and yanking that chest voice as high as that bad boy will go but before we do that check out my social medias here alright so belting has a history of getting a bad rap vocal coaches and some singers will tell you it's unhealthy to belt you need to mix instead the hallmark of sls singing is don't pull chest light and right the other the other concept that when you talk about replacing pulled up checks with pull down mix well number one pull up chest is [Music] a lot of people think full voice chest voice and so they'll yell to hit high notes i remember going to my first bridge saying ah it gets dull it gets stuck out of the mouth if i say i'm pulling up my chest voice if you have to drive if you have to push to go higher you're in trouble i am here today to tell you that that's a bunch of the people saying those things are just saying nonsense because one they lack the evidence to support their claims that it's unhealthy or dangerous and two they can sell them successfully do the sounds themselves the truth is that they just never learned how to do the sounds in a healthy way and this is probably at least partially because their teachers told them it was bad and their teachers before them told them it was bad so it just goes on and on as someone that can belt i'm gonna explain to you how to do it but first what is belting sadly in the world of singing the exact same words get used with different meanings so people will say belting to describe different sounds but here's what i think you think belting is but now i can't [Music] wow [Music] the cold never bothered me anyway [Music] me [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right and how is this different from other types of sound well we can probably rule out falsetto head voice sounding stuff right [Music] oh [Music] [Music] but what about sounds like this [Music] is all good when you're around girl nobody from the past is beating you right now [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] it's warming up can you feel [Music] oh [Music] i'm gonna stay right there now i don't consider that belting and those sounds are not what i'm going to be helping you with in this video okay so what is belting belting has four aspects they're like ingredients in a pie or something a belting pie aspect one is that the vocal folds are vibrating with their entire mass like this as opposed to like this they are also staying together for a longer period of time when they vibrate and they are closing very quickly after opening so if my hands are going to be the vocal folds they're sort of vibrating like this and in other words you have very strong closure with the vocal folds what does that sound like it sounds like this aspect two the acoustic registration aka the vowels the registration you're using is open timbre or yell timbre meaning that at least one harmonic has still not raised above the first format okay it sounds complicated but basically the sound of your voice is open or spread sounding and not more closed or dark or narrowed or tall when you analyze the resonance it actually shows you what's going on when we are belting we have this going on alright guys now i'm going to demonstrate the difference between the correct acoustic registration and the wrong acoustic registration and we're going to take a look at how they visually appear different in this software [Music] all right guys so the difference between this example here and this example here is basically the correct acoustic registration and the incorrect and what you can see here in the first one is that this one is super strong especially when i went higher right here it got much darker and that means it got stronger and over here the reverse happened it actually got weaker and so this is essentially the wrong way and the right way so what's happening here is that in this one i'm in what's known as yell coupling or yell timbre and in this one right here i'm going into closed timbre and this is what i mean when i'm saying the sound gets more closed um versus staying more open so basically what i'm saying is you can only belt certain vowel sounds and e and ooh are off the table you don't need to understand the science to do it you just need to be able to hear the sounds and recognize the differences in the sound and aspect three the pitch needs to be high enough for it to be a belt no one is calling this a belt even though it meets the first two criteria [Music] so where's the line for when the pitch becomes high enough for it to be belting well i would say that generally at about an f4 for men and an a4 for women i think this is something you can feel in your body i would say it's the point at which you have to adjust your vocal tract's position in order to go higher without losing the openness to the sound aka the open timbre or yell timbre so if i have aspect 1 and 2 going on and i keep going higher if i don't want the sound to change to a mix i'll have to adjust my vocal tract and in the case of belting that means opening my mouth more and getting a bit louder mixing is a result of not adjusting the vocal tract as you go up which i talk about a lot in my video on mix voice the magic trio [Music] belting is the result of adjusting the vocal tract as you go up now this brings me to aspect four which is higher breath pressure or support if you don't understand that concept then you can check it out here if i'm going higher in pitch and i cross the pitch threshold where belting is supposed to be but i back off the pressure i'll get this kind of fake belt it's a lighter sounding thing and it's not really a belt [Music] now doing this also robs me of aspect one of belting the correct vocal fold coordination because in order to have a really strong adduction or vocal fold closure my vocal folds need to resist a lot of air pressure if you don't have the air pressure for belting your vocal folds won't be doing what we need for belting alright so that's what belting is it's technically a strategy or a way of singing higher notes and it differs from other strategies or techniques so how do you do it well before we get to that i have to address something really serious guys why haven't you like this video and subscribe to the channel and if you've done that then why aren't i getting more views i don't know anyways if you can do these things you're gonna do well with belting number one find a really clear loud chesty quality with your voice number two find the yell pocket as you ascend and number three twang let's start with number one this is like your foundation for belting it's like the springboard that you're gonna jump off of to get higher in cvt terms and you can check out my video on that if you haven't seen it yet we really want a metallic sound not neutral and you want it to be very full so we don't want this kind of a sound [Music] instead we want these kinds of sound a [Applause] [Music] this will allow us to achieve aspect one by the way which is correct vocal fold coordination don't let yourself get weak and airy as you ascend like this okay okay okay now it's time for part two the yell pocket remember aspect two to the definition of belting the acoustic crap well that's basically what this is at a certain point in your ring you want to take your voice to a more yelly or called quality this is gonna be at different points for men and women generally speaking so we're gonna start nice and low in an open sound like on an a or an o this doesn't feel closed like an e or an u right e e [Applause] [Music] it's open and for ladies you can try it right here [Music] oh and so now we want to slide up into the yellow pocket like this [Music] ladies you'll be here now if i don't enter the yell pocket it could be because i was too open like this in sensation the more open brighter lower sound feels more forward like the vibration of the sound is here and the yell pocket one feels like it's at the back of my throat behind my eyes and to me this also just feels like the vowel is closing slightly you don't want it to be too open or too closed we're aiming for the goldilocks zone here which is the yell pocket too closed would sound like a to open just right [Music] [Applause] once you get into the yelp pocket you want to make sure you stay there how well you keep adjusting your vocal tract as you go up in pitch and that keeps the sound from closing if i start in the yell pocket and i keep the same vocal track shape as i go up in pitch i'm not going to get a belt [Applause] in order to belt i must open my mouth more and more and i need to keep going increasingly horizontal with my mouth shape not vertical so i basically call this technique progressive opening because the pitch goes up and you need to open up more and more more space more range and by the way this is why if you see really really good singers they're not afraid of opening their mouths because this is how you do it it takes a lot of confidence to be able to open your mouth like but ultimately that's what you need to be able to do to get those high notes in a belt anyways this is where the third aspect of belting comes into play the pitch threshold now the pitch where the sound closes unless i actively open more is where it's going to start to sound like and become a belt now the higher i go the more i need to increase the breath pressure which is aspect 4 of belting if i don't do that i won't be able to extend the range of my belt it'll just thin out and go towards a lighter sound [Music] belting takes a lot of energy and you can't be afraid of being hurt or cracking you just gotta go for it all right so now we have this kind of shouted sound but wait a minute how is this supposed to result in something like this hey because aren't they both belting oh you're smart basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna transform our yelly sound into a brighter more twang sound in cvt terms we're going to go from overdrive to edge now for twang i want you to think about creating a brighter sound you know how some radios will let you adjust the treble and the bass with their own respective dials well imagine that twang is the treble dial and you're gonna crank that bad boy up it helps to raise the larynx raise the back of the tongue and smile broadly so we're basically going to start our sound in the more shouted quality and then do these things in order to add twang and brightness and this will allow us to build even higher notes because basically that yelly sound that is overdrive and complete vocal technique well this sound has a pitch limit so for both men and women it doesn't go as high as the brighter one does so it's really important that we learn how to transition from that heavy shouted quality to this brighter one so let's try this first on a really low note where we aren't in the yellow pocket it should get brighter nastier louder all good things it shouldn't feel like you're squeezing the crap out of your throat it needs to be comfortable so if we try to take this higher we actually still want to go through the yell pocket you don't want to go too open or too closed a [Applause] [Music] now let's try starting in the yellow pocket with the yellier one and adding twang [Music] ladies you're gonna be [Music] now from here we need to figure out how do we ascend in pitch and transition from that yellier shoutier sound to the more twanged sound because there's just no way that we can take the yelly sound to infinity it has to twang more the higher we go because we aren't going to extend the belting range if we don't we're just going to mix like this so for men right around a4 is typically a pivotal note to start increasing twang and by c sharp 5 territory you really need to start letting go of that yelly feeling entirely so for my ladies c5 is going to be a pivotal note where you need to add some twang and e flat 5 or so is going to be typically where you need to let go of the yelly feeling entirely so as i go up in pitch i'm going to enter the yellow pocket keep adjusting my vocal tract to extend that higher and right around a4 i'm going to introduce some of the twang into my voice i'm a bit tired right now physically and vocally so that demonstration is a bit thinner and less coordinated than it could be so the higher i go the more that twang just takes over and i inevitably thin out more and more and lose the belty quality entirely [Music] now keep in mind that i've been doing this for a while and i couldn't do it overnight it was a lot of trial and error and refining things but this is basically the information that i learned that led to me being able to belt of course with a lot of practice and some guidance some common mistakes that you might make while you try doing this are number one not opening your mouth enough the higher you go and i see this one constantly it turns out that you know a lot of singers aren't super comfortable opening their mouths really wide so this might take some getting used to the second thing is being afraid fear will seriously wreck you now if you're afraid of being heard while doing this then i strongly suggest that you find somewhere else you can practice it or suck it up because holding back isn't gonna get you anywhere with belting number three is raising the larynx too much too early you don't want to overdo the brightness and end up feeling really tight in your throat in the middle part of your range number four is not supporting properly and what i mean is that you aren't generating your breath pressure in an appropriate manageable sustainable way and again you can check out my video one of the ways you might miscoordinate your support is getting too tense in your core area and as you go up in pitch you just keep going tighter and tighter and this might lead to very strong false fold approximation which i like to call grandpa voice on the flip side you may be not tensing your core enough and you're way too relaxed making it difficult for you to find higher breath pressure levels needed for belting so either you're working too hard or you're lazy now this is a really condensed how-to video and me just saying what to do and demonstrating may not translate into you correctly doing it and you might need some help and some guidance i definitely did if you feel you need some help email me at voicelessonswithgreg gmail.com and you'll be belting in no time alright guys thanks for watching if you liked the video like the video if you don't like the video then still like the video leave your questions suggestions and other meaningful pros down in the comments below and i will talk to you soon bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Studio West

Views: 1,730,190

Keywords: mix, mixed voice, mix voice, singing higher notes, how to belt, how to sing higher, how to sing louder, how to sing powerfully, pulling chest voice, how to sing, how to sing better

Id: 3bylCYaXHgc

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021