HOW TO GET RID OF VOCAL BREAK - PART 2 - STAY IN CHEST VOICE BUT REFINE IT!

Welcome to PART 2 on how to get rid of the vocal break.  Let's recap what we covered in PART 1:

• I showed you the proof that myself and my students can sing through the vocal break.
• I demonstrated falsetto, 2 different types of head voice, chest voice, mixed voice and explain how they all fit together in the puzzle of the vocal break.

If you haven't seen PART 1 of how to sing past your break, then check that out first here.

Now that we’ve gotten the terminology out of the way, in today’s video I’m going to show you the actual process on how to get rid of the vocal break.  How exactly is it done?  What sorts of sounds will you need to do?  That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

The biggest thing I want you to know right away is, we don’t actually wanna sing "around" our vocal break by leaving chest and going into falsetto and trying to "trick" the audience into thinking we're still in chest...  We want to ELIMINATE the vocal break and make it something that you can sing through!  A vocal break when it's strengthened will just become a "gear shift" where your vowels and chest voice will adjust.

How do we do this?

You need to STRENGTHEN your chest voice.  When the voice is STRONG the break will go away when it's coordinated the right way.  After some training the vocal break will start to move up higher.  Then eventually the break will become something you can actually SING THROUGH.  It might be wobbly and unstable at first but over time it'll get STRONGER and soon enough it'll feel like you're just taking your chest voice all the way up. 

"Chest voice?  What about mixed voice and headvoice????" You say.  Well what you've gotta understand is that people think chest voice has an "ending point".  If you start straining in chest voice they'll tell you "you're going too high in chest, go to head".  Well it's not that you're "going to high" it's that you're just straining.  Don't blame strain on chest voice.  Blame strain on strain.  Fix the strain and your chest voice will keep going. 

And when you're able to go up higher in chest voice, people will say you're in mixed voice or head voice.  These are just terms to describe your chest voice working properly when you get into the higher parts of your range.  Your chest voice will sound and feel a little different when you're in the high range so people call it "bridging into head" or "mixed voice" but really it's still the same voice you started with on the bottom that's why I call it chest voice. 

You don't leave it and go into another voice, you stay in the same voice.  You don't get to the top by leaving chest, you get there by staying in it and refining it so that instead of it getting stuck and straining, the resonance shifts and your voice tapers out and continues going up.

A huge key to this is keeping the vowels very CLEAR, and making sure you don't lose DEPTH in your voice when you're trying to keep the vowel clear.

The higher you try to sing in chest voice, the harder you'll find doing these will be.  You might be able to achieve it but you might achieve it through TENSION.  So we have to learn how to keep the notes "floating" and "resting" instead of FORCING them to happen.

Learning how to approach your low range and your higher range the right way is key to this.  So we approach the lower range with more of a sigh-like quality, and the higher range with more of a thinner, louder, brighter, "crying" sound.  I demonstrate both of these in the video above so make sure you check it out.