How to Strengthen your Head Voice. Well, this is true for both guys and girls,
and everybody’s voice type is different, and everybody’s range is different, and
everybody’s approach to singing is very different, in whatever styles they want to sing in. But it’s critical to understand that there’s
a lot of misconceptions floating around the Internet that I would like to kind of just
bring home to roost here for a second so I can share with you how I built my head
voice, and I have a very very powerful, strong head voice, and what it is that I did to grow
that. And there may be other people that have their
ways. I’m going to share with you my secrets,
okay? The first thing is there’s this misconception
that everything has to be loud. Big and loud. Or all of a sudden it’s about struggling
and getting to this big, loud space. It actually couldn’t be further from the
truth, in fact, when I first started to develop head voice, I started with really small spaces. In fact, we're going to do this together, you
and me, and we’re going to do small vowel sounds because that’s the easiest way to
get a nice bright timbre, that bright ping, remember? Ping is king! That real bright sound! So, we’re going to start on an EE vowel,
and I want to discuss this as we go. Now, guys and girls, I’m going to start
kind of high. Guys, if you can get up this high, and if
you can’t, just join us when you can, I’m going to go down the food chain here… Ladies, you’ll join me now, and you’re
going to join me all the way into the registration I’m about to do. Now if I went: “EEE” most people have
kind of a Flutie, Hootie “EEEEEE” It's kind of a real Flutie, Hootie, airy sort of space. Well that’s actually detrimental for your
vocal folds, and it’ll dry them out very quickly, and you won’t achieve this bright
ping, “Ping is King” that we’re looking for. So what we want to do is we want to close
down the sound really bright, into the front of the face, into the mask, and we want to
go: “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” nice and bright. Now, as you get better at this, and as you
can lean into this sound and as you can create more resonance for the sound, you’ll be
able to go: “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” but for our purposes here, I’m going
to back way off on the sound, and you can have derivations or percentages you know of
the light “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” or “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” or
“EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” depending on, you know, what song your singing or you
know, mezzo piano, mezzo forte, it just depends on what you’re looking to do. So join with me, but focus solely on how you
can bring a bright timbral sound to this. So if you’re really airy on the sound, maybe
I’m up too high for you, and you might want to start a little lower. So let’s go to the next one: “EE, EE,
EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” “EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE”
the brighter the better, and we don’t need volume. By the way, again: dispelling the idea that
volume is everything. Well, volume comes about, not by force. It comes about by resonance. It comes about by doing this and growing the
muscle, correctly, in a way where when it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, when you
add a little more strength in the abdomen: “EEEEEEEEE” you can actually kind of hit
it in the abdomen a little bit, relax the chest neck and throat, and just relax into
that space and resonance takes over and resonance does the work. You don’t see me straining in the throat
to do this, right? I’m rolling into the sound and hitting a
cool, God-given amphitheater of that vowel I’ve created, that God created, to give us
the space in the sound. So:”EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE”
”EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE, EE” Okay. Now you can kind of toggle back and forth
and go up a little higher or a little lower, but that sound, if you work it and work it
and work it, you’re going to notice that your head voice, or your falsetto, which is
translated into head voice, become stronger and brighter and more powerful and it will
match the sound of your chest voice so that you can go “LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY”
and go in and out of the passaggio and connect and fuse these together and have a percentage
of chest head mix, which is called mixed voice, where you can decide how much chest you want
to put into the sound, how much head voice you want to put into the sound, and how much
you want to mix the sound. So now, we went on EE, because EE is a nice
bright timbral sound. It’s really frontal, it’s got a lot of
good space, and it brings a lot into the velo-nasal port in the front of the face. But the next thing we can do is ooh. Now, ooh is actually part of the “AH/OH”
family of vowels. And we talked about the family of vowels in
one of our other sessions, and I don’t have time to go into that now, but if we go to
ooh, we start out on oh, cause we can’t sing ooh, we’d get caught in the throat. We go Oh/Ooh really quickly, and we go: “Oh-oooooooh! Oh-ooooooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh,
ooh.” Do it with me… Oh-ooooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh… Okay, now… The lower we can bring down our head voice,
now we’ve talked about this before. At first, we want to grow a nice robust, powerful
chest voice first, to be able to buttress and sustain and hold up our head voice. So we’ve got to build the foundation first. I cover all of this in building chest voice. This is a secondary thing, a complement to
that, where we come back now and build head voice. By the way I cover all of this in my singing
course. You can check it out here, it’s called How
To Sing Better Than Anyone Else, where literally I break all of this stuff down for you guys,
where it’s step by step by step, that can train all of this stuff for you guys to help
you build a robust, super-powerful head voice: “HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!” Like, you can Kill it, right? And you can then translate that on down into
chest, and then any kind of variation or derivation or percentage thereof in mixed voice. Alright! Now, we did EE. Now we want to do… I’m sorry, we did EE and Ooh. We want to do AH. And Ah is a little tricky, because “AH”
you want to have the throat wide open, and because it’s a bigger vowel, it’s a little
harder to manage up top. So, we’re going to go… we’re going to
be real, kinda ginger on the sound. “LAAAAAAH, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah”
“LAAAAAAH, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah” Now. Remember. Ping is King. Remember that really bright, timbral sound. Remember that the doctor wants to see your
tonsils. Remember the yawning sensation. Remember strength from the abdomen. “LAAAAAAH, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah” Now ladies, if you want, you can start this
even higher, but this is a pretty good mean average of where you should start. Guys, you could start up here too. If it’s a little too high for you, you can
kind of join in where you feel comfortable enough, without strain, to join us down, you
know maybe around a D or a C or something like that to start to build that thing, the
timbre, excuse me. Now, one other really important thing is that
as we’re building this, I start out real gentle, Lah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah…. And if that’s all you have, it’s okay. That’s how I started. And then little by little you can lean into
the sound a little bit more. Lah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah…. Right? Now, we also discussed vowel modifications,
and it’s really important, because it’s not just “AH” it’s how that "AH" is supposed
to feel in the throat. So I have a whole section in my singing course
called "How To Sing Better Than Anyone Else" where I cover all of these vowel modifications
and how to get to the placement in the throat to where you don’t feel like your kind of
gagging on the vowel or you’re choking or clamping down on the vowel. Okay? All right, guys! I hope you enjoyed this, and we’ve got more
coming your way! Until next time… Peace. Out.
