Sing Better in Chest Voice

this lesson is all about chest voice specifically expanding chest voice range comfortably and sustainably safely so what exactly is chest voice now I'm not going to go into the science of like thyroid thyroid retinoid muscles and all that stuff because it wouldn't really serve you right now you want to know how to use it so think of your voice in two parts and they're really more than that but for the sake of this video you have the big heavy voice that you speak with you can think fly me to the moon let me plan the stars let me see what life is like on Jupiter and Mars chest voice then you have head voice at least in my voice that would be kind of pure head force vocal weight it is a thing this is where a lot of you are really struggling if you're not aware of it you might not be aware of it this is the reason as we go higher we start to feel this sense of heaviness you feel like there's an imminent threat that your throat will implode you look even if you manage to sound good there's that feeling of being kind of pulled down and this becomes the anchor point for the singing and it gets really bad round in circles and you start yelling it out a lot of you asked me what is the difference between yelling and singing powerfully because I get this a lot people say like I have a friend and when she sings this powerful singing when I try it I'm singing the notes but it sounds like I'm yelling and it's because you are when we are anchored here you get there uh and when you when we get to anchor in the body ah we can push out so that's what we want to do and of course you can go higher lower that book for now let's just find our healthy anchor spot because we know that this is not the way so I want you to touch your epigastrium what the hell is that we all have a left and right pectoral muscle or let them right breast whatever you set pectoral muscles but we have a bone in between you could hear it's hard you might better hear me don't be honey I want you to trace down that bone until you get to that first bit of flesh so it's bone bone bone flesh and we want to find this spot it should feel like you can push into it no matter how strong or how much your abs are there should be a very distinguishable difference easily distinguishable difference between bone and flesh so you want that uppermost part of the ABS okay make sure you can find that if you think of your rib cage doing this it's right within that so it's the uppermost part of the ABS in the center but please every time I do workshops there's always that one person was like mmhmm yeah I'm feeling it mm-hmm this always happens without fail if you're up here I want you to focus I know it can be kind of scary like oh he wants me to find something not to do work yes you can do this we start with the bone it's hard it's bone I promise you and that up their stomach that's all it is up one notch is bone again but I want to be on the stomach the highest part of my abdomen so it's not stomach but it's the highest part of my abdomen so I want you to push in can you cough gently almost like a voiceless call you should notice that it kind of it bounces out there's this paradoxical effect that we as singers have to have where instead of everything coming down we have muscles that need to go out that's what's gonna engage our diaphragm and help us to compress breath for powerful sound in any register but for now for thethe chest voice this muscle also helps to facilitate chest voice pacifically but whatever so we're just feeling it now if you can feel it with a call can you feel it with a hiss as in the letter s not a gentle hit I know I have a video where am i kissing gently but this is a strong one like a strong forceful hiss very short and detached very staccato if you know musical terms so it's just very quick hisses notice it's popping out it's not once it's not doing that so make sure that is popping out can you feel that if you cannot pause the video and come back when you can I don't recommend doing a whole lot of coughing a little bit's not gonna cure you but I don't recommend doing a whole lot because that can irritate your vocal folds and it's that time of year and everybody's kind of having stuff so try to focus more on the hissing part but you can and see if you can feel it there okay this is the muscles on that we want this is where your diaphragm connects to the abdominal wall here your diaphragm is 360 degrees but this is this is giving us a unique opportunity to literally feel it and to see it so we have some wonderful sensory and visual cues that we can work with to know our diaphragm is working why am I being so dramatic I I don't know so let's move on so again if you're here that means you can feel it with the hiss if you cannot you need to go back so let's get a little fancier we're gonna do what I call the one two three not a very imaginative name so I want one two three but you're gonna really think short short sustain so it's gonna be H see how it kind of lifts me up and then when I stopped you a power back down so you're gonna notice that your lower belly is gonna kind of come in and up it's gonna be kind of scooped but your upper abdomen this magic spot here this in this place this some people literally call it the magic spot of her to call the button that already called the diamond I've heard it called the triangle have heard of called everything but I just want you to feel it I don't care what you call it you can call it Sally I don't I don't care but just press into it and feel it but it's needs to it needs to work if you're getting those not right we don't want that and I mentioned the belly this happens is a byproduct don't try to force this to happen this is not the key this is the key you need to feel the muscle will harden and protrude forward it will firm and protrude forward almost like a cartoon characters heart beating out of its chest you know it you know it's almost that kind of feeling so again if you're still struggling with that or if you just need to practice honestly struggling then pause the video and if you've got it let's move on I know we're going really fast the longest part spotted my explanation in the beginning so this next part is very simple we're gonna use the Z or Zed depending on what part of the world your problem is what you call it but this is soundness in the word Zoo so I want you to make this sound while touching this muscle I want you to actually touch it so now we're connecting this to our vocal cords okay this now we're about to get to the good part so really focus here if you're getting this relax these muscles relax them they can do nothing for you we are forsaking these we're gonna focus here of course my voice is naturally quite low and deep if you would do it with a comfortable pitch for you so if your voice is way higher than mine don't talk let's try to push it down let it be whatever makes sense for your voice but I need a sound not all above us and make this muscle awaken okay can you feel that so in the a approach method the method that I teach the method that I've originated we teach two types of support reflexive support and active support reflexive support is what we just finished working on a bit it's when we stimulate reflexive responses from the body to support the voice it's like a knee jerk you ever seen those old timey doctors where they would hit the kid on the knee in there you know and their leg would kick we're kind of stimulating these automatic knee-jerk responses you know but from these muscles the problem is when we sing songs typically if we want to get the most of our voices especially if your voice is heavy like mine but even if it's not even if you just want your most power we have to use what we call active support when you deliberately engage one or several muscles this is just one we're gonna talk about that a little later but this is a good one when you deliberately engage muscles to support the voice so here's your challenge you're gonna notice right now from a Z to an op or Zed to enough.you you know I'm saying so I'm gonna [Music] seems easy right this is the challenge though which you're probably gonna get is this you're gonna feel that someone told the wind from your sails that is normal I cannot emphasize that enough the key is to consciously focus we have to make these normally involuntary muscles voluntary it is well within your human capabilities most people are just never tasked with having to do this and like I tell people all the time I'm so incredibly strong in muscles you can't see you you would know and all my students are as vocalist we have to be aware of muscles and muscular mechanisms that the average person just doesn't have to know you know so we we are no singer folk have to nota do have to access these hidden features these hidden powers of our body so you're gonna into an art it could be any pitch it does not matter we just don't want this it can't drop you can literally stand in front of a mirror and practice this you can see for yourself if you're doing it or not you don't have to guess your body will let you know either you will open up and stay up or you will who power down and drop but I promise you if you can keep it engaged you will notice a boost to the fullness and freedom of your voice if you press here and you exercise it a lot you may start to notice that your solar you may be like oh it's tinder that is fine it should not hurt but it should be or it can be sore in like a you know I've been working out Conaway not gonna dear God please make it stop kind of way so if you feel like oh this is I'm like this is hurting me thing stop you're doing something crazy or you need to see a doctor it should feel like okay I got a little bit of a workout and you might feel like well I was doing it for a few minutes and then now I lost the strength that is also normal we're utilizing muscular mechanisms that the average person never does not deliberately that the average person never does so deliberately and we're trying to teach these muscles to carry the burden of our voice instead of these muscles which many of us have overly trained to be overly responsive and over-reactive and they cost so many problems so do this drill several times but I want to give you the last part in how do we apply this to songs but before we move on I would like to mention that if you like this technique there are many more in my breathing bootcamp for singers program like as I mentioned at the beginning of the video there is so much hidden untapped power in so many of you in your bodies and if you learn how to utilize the respiratory posture muscles your support muscles your breathing muscles you will be amazed at what you can do I consider it almost a lost art because people know that you can do it but there's so much ambiguity and there's so much it's just so nebulous the way it's taught but in my program breathing bootcamp for singers we go into great detail on exactly what muscles are working what it feel like how do you exercise it how do you train it how do you use it very clearly you can also ask questions and stuff so I always take having advertised my stuff but I also need to pay bills and stuff as much as I love sharing things with you for free but that's that you can get it on a approached comm it should be flashed across the screen at some point and let's move on to the last part applying this to songs let's say you have I don't need to be anything other than a prison guard son I don't have to be anything it's not a super high super powerful thing but it's a super realistic kind of way of singing and so if we're singing that it's the beginning of a verse of a Gavin DeGraw song and so let's say that you're like I don't need to be I don't mean you're trying to do that because sometimes we're so worried about the high notes we forget that there's a whole bunch of lead-up to that so we would do this [Music] we call this substitution it's when we replace lyrics with a helper sound that naturally stimulates the muscle with a little bit of conscious focus and it will help to warm it up and also strengthen it and of course after you do that a few times I don't need to be anything other than a prison I don't have to be a noob on another so you can try to stimulate it deliberately you can even touch it uh-oh this is something that's important you might notice that sometimes this is that you'll see a big movement and then other times I don't know you don't see any movement you might be like what the hell is that about I'm gonna explain if you have less breath in your body you're gonna see a big jump but if you take a full breath first it looks more like stability so in other videos I have especially on my ig TV my Instagram TV I'll talk about how important it is that was stabilized ribcage that stabilizes our breath supply gives us a more professional sound makes the voice sound more stable and clean and gives you more control and sometimes you ask me like how do you keep the ribs open through hope like how are we doing that this is one of the ways this is one of the house this muscle here so I'm going to shake it down so when it's off or when you're almost empty it has this lifting effect like I said that cartoon like ah you know heart beating through the chest kind of kind of look but if we take a full breath it just makes me look stable and so you look quite calm even though you are doing some work here actually it is unseasonally warm here this is ridiculous it makes no sense anyway um let's move on this technique does not make vocal weight disappear it just gives us a healthy way of lifting that weight and much like lifting like weights in a gym you have to build up your strength to lift gradually I know that like half y'all are going to want to go to the hardest song ever as I read the comments I know it's gonna be something like I'm gonna sing Demi Lovato's high E flat in the such-and-such and that's where everybody wants to go to whatever that is for them um but I want you to resist the urge to go to the extreme start off gently this is a lesson on just expanding chest voice range notice I didn't say belting specifically because there are many components this is just one it's a very very good one and for some of you for many of you this may be the missing key for your full-on belting but you know I'm really big on safety a lot of my day is spent there's a long shirt my a lot of my day is spent rehabbing the voices of professional singers who have injured them from doing too much before they were ready in many cases the talent is there and the musicality is there they're just not properly conditioned and so you want to build up the proper muscles that can help you to sustain these sounds and this is one of them like I said a little earlier I do have a program if you want to go to airport comm and you can learn more about how this muscle and some others can help you to gain more strength more freedom and more control but play with this be patient with yourself it will work um in the beginning it feels really arduous but eventually you'll learn to sing with a sense of connection to this area all the time and so how much of this you use is however much you need to pull yourself off of this sometimes you'll need less strength here sometimes you'll need more it depends on what you're singing like I said before but learn to tap into this experiment play around but listen to your body that should not hurt if this hurts you're doing something wrong always they should not hurt can it work a little bit if you don't rock vocals or something you kind of have no choice of whom be honest with you but um certain extremes of sound but for now still like nonetheless I strongly encourage you to try to keep it light at first just for the sake of safety and as you get more strength you'll know because you'll feel like you can lift heavier sound with greater ease and with greater stamina so that's it for now go to a approach calm check out the breathing bootcamp for singers program where I talk about this more in detail with special exercises as well as a bunch of other stuff so until next time peace

Channel: EricArceneaux

Views: 467,889

Rating: 4.9716907 out of 5

Keywords: voice lessons, how to sing, chest voice, how to belt, mix voice, musical theater, stronger voice

Id: oadVau39QNg

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 12 2019