The CoMMUNITY SINGer

Hello, and welcome back to The Community Singer. This is episode five, and is the third part of the core principles of singing. This episode is all about the sound production.

So, we've already spoken about breath and connection and now we're going to move on to how those two things come together to produce the sound that we want and for us, obviously, we're talking about singing, but the same applies for speech as well. So, this is all part of just using the voice.

When we connect breath and pitch and rhythm, then these things come together to form singing and that is the basis of everything that we do. First of all, it's important to understand some basics about the voice. In singing, we have different registers, which allow us to sing at different pitches on different notes.

We've talked about already how the vocal folds come together and go short and fat long and thin, depending on what we're trying to achieve in terms of pitch - how high or how low we're trying to sing. There's also something else that we have to think about when we're trying to sing different notes and that is the part of the voice we're trying to use, the register of the voice that we're trying to use.

When we're talking, when we're in speech, we're generally in a part of the voice called chest voice. The reason we call it chest voice is because the resonance is being made in the chest. If you just put your hand here and just say something to me, say, “hello, this is my chest voice”, then you'll probably feel the resonance, the vibration in your chest. That's how we know we're in chest voice; you’re making this warm sound, then all the resonance is coming from this lower part of the body and we go up through the voice. The chest resonance can't happen in the same way, so we have to adjust this in order for us to go high.

We have to use resonance in different parts of the voice, different parts of the body.

So after we've been in chest resonance, in chest voice, if we want to go to the high part of our voice, no matter if we're male or female voice, if we want to go into a high note, we would have to use the head resonance or the head voice. So we have chest voice in the low part of the voice, and we have head voice in the high part of the voice. In the middle, there is a bit of a gap. And sometimes we can really feel that as we try to sing through the different parts of our voice. You might feel it yourself if you're doing an ‘ah’ for example, you may find in that middle something is happening but you're not really sure whether it's chest or it’s head voice. The reason for this is is a different part of your register. We like to call it mix or middle register.

In classical singing, we don't tend to use mix at all. We have head voice that comes all the way down, and that's one of the most beautiful stylistic things about classical singing. It’s that classical singers can bring their head voice down, and it sounds so beautiful and elegant all the way down to the bottom of their voice.

But for any other kind of singing, musical theatre, pop singing, folk singing, it's likely you'll want to find this middle part of the voice called mix or middle and that is so that you can have the same focused sound as you've got at the bottom and at the top throughout the range. I'll do a quick demonstration of what it sounds like to be in these different registers of the voice so that you can hear it. As we go in between these registers in the voice, we have to go through something called the break, which you may have heard of before. This is also known as Passaggio in classical singing or transition and they’re three exactly the same things. That's the breaking point when we go between one register and another. Nothing is broken, so you don't need to be worried about that. You just have to know how to access smoothly between these places, and that is one of the hardest things in singing. We'll try and talk about that a little bit later, or you might want to work on that when you're going through your singing journey with your singing teacher or your coach. So, to demonstrate the three registers of the voice, chest voice. I'm in my spoken voice.

You can hear I'm in that low, warm part of the voice. I've got chest resonance.

I'm sure you can practice yourself and give it a go and see how that feels.

You want to feel like you're being quite strong, quite sure as if you're kind of shouting out to someone, ay, ah, ah. Try it yourself.

Keep it nice and low, and really round. And then you'll be in chest voice. Then I go to the top of my voice, and I will be able to change into my head resonance in order to find my head voice.

You can hear it's a different part of the voice. I'm in the top of my voice and I'm using the resonances all up here. It feels almost like it's spinning around my forehead and sort of in the temples of my head, nothing going on in my chest at all. Can't feel any resonance there at all.

Now I come down through the range, and I come into the middle section of my voice and what happens is the head voice and the chest voice have a breaking point where they meet and you have to try and work out something to do.

If I sing up through my voice, you'll hear the breaking point. So in my chest voice, here we go.

You can hear as I went to the top note, something happened. I had my break into my different part of the voice, and I went into head voice. I'll do that again so you can really hear it. Listen to what happens on the top note.

And you can hear as I flip back into my chest voice, in order to come back down. Now I'm gonna demonstrate how you can change your head voice into more of a mixed voice in order for that transition to become smoother. So I'm gonna start in my chest voice and then I'm gonna go into mix.

Here we go.

Hopefully, you could hear as I went to the top that time. I changed the vowel a little bit to help me to go to more of an ‘a’ sound rather than an ‘ah’ sound, but the sound itself was able to be more focused and it was balanced more with the chest voice.

Hope you agree.

So if I go all the way through my range now, I do a whole octave, chest voice, mid, and then head at the top, Hopefully, we can have the most balance between all of those different registers and, ideally, most people in an audience wouldn't be able to hear. You would always feel it. Here we go.

So that was all of the three registers.

Hopefully, quite smooth, so you could feel the transition, but it wasn't too overwhelming. It wasn't head voice, chest voice and nothing in between.

So that's ideally what we're trying to do when we find our mix voice.

So obviously, this is what we are trying to achieve with the mixed voice, but this comes after an awful lot of hard work and practice. So don't worry if you're not able to do a mix voice yet. Go to a head voice as soon as you can. So go into your chest voice, find your head voice, and just go in head voice and the more you do that, the stronger the head voice will become and you'll be more able to find your mix at some point. For now, why don't you have a practice of just trying out all of these different parts of the voice and just feeling more familiar with all three of them. Make sure that you're not pushing that chest voice too high. You're not feeling like your shouting and going too high in the chest voice, and you'll allow that head voice to take over sooner rather than later.

Now we're going to move on to some voice sound, Using the same sounds that we did previously with the non fricative sounds. Then we move to the fricative sounds - we did those sounds in the previous episode.

Now I'm going to do just a little connected warm up of the voice using those sounds and adding on some more normal vocalised sounds.

So in the same ways we did previously, I'm going to do one and please repeat after me.

Here we go.

We're gonna go right through from the non voiced to the voiced into some sounds. Here we go.

‘Sh’

Remember to ‘splat’ every time.

Voice sounds.

‘V’

Follow me

‘Ah’

Remember to ‘splat’ every time.

Yar Yar Yar Yar Yar Yay

Yay Yay Yay Yay Yay Yay

You You You You You You

Very good. You can practice these whenever you feel like it going through from non voiced to voice fricatives through to the sounds. As long as you're keeping that breath going, connecting through to the sound with the vocal folds, you'll be doing great practise for your voice.

See you next time

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