No, I’m not planning on trying out for American Idol. I just like singing along with the car stereo.
But my range is limited. I can switch back and forth between modal and falsetto, though it occasionally sounds a little odd, especially because at the bottom of the falsetto range it’s hard to sing with an appropriately loud volume.
Think of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” with the falsetto syllables show in parentheses:
I (have cli)imbed (highest moun)tains
I (have ru)un (through the) fields
only to be with you
So how can I get my vocal cords to do what I want 'em to do, i.e. sing that whole stretch without having to resort to falsetto? I don’t expect to be the next Geddy Lee, but I’d hope there’s room for improvement over where I’m at right now.
I’d like to know this as well… my vocal training has been lackluster at best, and my range currently sits too high for a tenor, and too low for an alto.
Get a better teacher, then. Although in my case it lowered my range by about a fourth; I didn’t lose any of the upper end, but I gained a lot of power and resonance in the genuine bass register.
Briefly, the key to hitting the higher notes is to relax and let the timbre “thin out” a little - you won’t get the same richness at the upper end that you do in the comfortable middle of your natural range, and you should not try. But don’t try forcing out the high notes by squeezing really, really hard, which is the besetting sin of most of us who aren’t properly trained (and I’d been singing for upwards of thirty years before getting professional lessons). And take it a bit at a time.
Take voice lessons from a good teacher, is the short answer. I used to be an alto before taking voice lessons, but apparently I’m actually a coloratura soprano. I’m actually sort of scared by some of the notes I can reach when I’m properly warmed up.
The longer answer: the sound should come from your diaphragm, not your throat. As malacandra said, if you tighten your throat the sound gets all squeezed off; you should relax your throat and jaw and tighten your diaphragm/abs to produce the sound. (This is exactly the opposite of what you want to do, so it takes practice.) A way of seeing how your lower body muscles ought to behave is to try singing a rolled r, or if you (like me) can’t roll your r’s, to sing on a lip trill (push air out of your mouth until your lips vibrate). You will be surprised at how much energy it takes. Singing with that amount of energy in your abs, in addition to shaking your jaw (to get rid of any residual tension) will help a lot.
You also need to aim the sound (using your upper cheek muscles, while still keeping your jaw relaxed) to come out above your mouth. I know that sounds weird but I don’t have a better way to say it. (My poor voice teacher tried for years to come up with a way I would understand, but this is the best we could do.) This is why you really need a voice teacher, to tell you when you’re doing this right or wrong, as it’s very hard to describe.
Catch cold. I normally have a Basso voice, but when I’m getting over a cold I can hit a few notes even lower (think: “Ol’ Man River,” an octave lower than normal). Of course my upper range sucks.
Different teachers are, of course, going to have different opinions. For instance, this:
while believed firmly and taught by many teachers, is, I believe, totally wrong (no offense to you, raspberry hunter). You can’t “aim” or “place” a tone. What teachers call “placement” is really just vowel formation. Using the cheek muscles to manipulate the tone will at worst cause the vowel to spread, and at best make you look silly. (That’s a simplification. Raising the cheeks can have an effect, but it’s not necessary. You can achieve the same results simply by properly forming the vowel, letting the shape of the pharynx and mouth do the work. Certainly keeping your face “active” is essential, since a dead-pan face will tend to result in laziness through the rest of the mechanism, leading to a dull, flat sound (for both physiological and psychological reasons), but the cheeks themselves are merely a part of the whole, and serve no special purpose.)
Again, of course, opinions differ. Sometimes violently (or at least loudly).
My own teaching concentrates on registration; that is, working to balance the chest (modal) and head (falsetto) registers to create a consistent sound throughout the range. It’s rather ridiculously complicated, which, as others have said, is why you need a teacher.
Proper breathing and support is, of course, critical, but if the registers aren’t balanced, all you’ll get is a well supported bad sound.
HUH. That is not strictly contrary to what my teacher says (she is always after me to work on my vowels; as someone who has immigrant parents and grew up in the South, my vowels need a LOT of work), and b) actually makes a lot of sense to me, and explains why when I consciously try to manipulate the cheek muscles I have a very bad track record of getting it to work (whereas when I get the rest of the mechanism right, it often has the effect of seeming to me as if I am using those muscles… if that makes any sense). So thanks very much for posting, as that is giving me something to think about (and may in fact help me a lot).
My teacher talks about what you call “registration” as well, but I don’t understand that well enough to say much about it.
It’s quite possible that your voice teacher really just wants you to sort of “lift” your face in order to keep it active and expressive. As I said, that will help immensely with keeping the tone lively and on pitch, and on keeping the vowels bright and “well placed”.
As for vowels, English speakers in general have a tougher time of it than, say Italians, simply because English vowels tend to be impure and imprecise. That’s one reason why voice teachers like to teach a lot of Italian songs and arias.
I don’t know about the cheek thing, but I got instruction to sing “out the top of my head.” I don’t know why, but the visualization of that seemed to help me achieve the tone I needed. ::shrug::
That kind of instruction helps you keep your soft palate up, which is kind of hard to do with the instruction “keep your soft palate up”. We have all kinds of tricks to make students do things that are hard to do directly. (Another interesting one, completely the opposite, is to ask students to sing out of their belly button, which encourages support.)
I should say that I don’t have as much of a problem with the idea of “placement” as I indicated before. It can be a good indirect procedure to do things like keep the palate up and the pharynx open. It’s not generally my preferred way of doing things, but there are many perfectly valid approaches.
I remain firm on the idea of lifting your cheeks, though.
When I first heard of “lifting your cheeks”, I wound up trying to smile too much and wound up pinching off the tone. I never even realized it until I started recording my voice. (My voice teachers have always been more worried about my inability to memorize literature in a timely fashion and certain bad habits I picked up always singing in a choral setting. I need to find a more tone-oriented teacher.)
