Improve Your Singing: Develop the Chest Voice

1. Introduction: Hi, and welcome to another singing lesson, this time on chest voice. I'm Beatrice D'Souza. I'm a professional singer and vocal coach. I have done my bachelors and masters degree in classical singing, and I sing as a soloist in many opera houses and concert halls in Europe. Today, we will go in depth on the lowest register of the singing voice. It is very important for anyone interested in singing, either beginners, advanced students, or professional singers to understand the registers of the voice. They build up the mechanism of the voice, and it is essential that we understand this mechanisms to be able to control our voice and be in command of it. This lesson is divided into three main sections. On the first section, we will see, what is chest voice, why we need it, and how it can actually develop your voice as a whole? On the second section, we will see what are the characteristics of chest voice, and the specific tools that you can use to discover it and connect to it each time. On the third section, we will see very specific exercises that you can use in your daily practice, and also include in your warm-ups that will help you to strengthen your voice, and really develop this register. I'm sure you are going to love this lesson and learn a lot, and also have fun. Let's get started. 2. What Is Chest Voice: What is chest voice and why do we need it? Chest voice is one of the most important registers in our voice that we should develop. I encourage every one of you to really take this into consideration and take time to hone this register of your voice. I know everyone is looking for high notes, we want brilliant high notes, but the chest voice is going to help you so much with the high notes as well, with the middle voice which a lot of female voices have problems with the middle voice, and of course with the low notes, because chest voice is basically the lowest part of our voice. As we go up, these low notes will keep supporting the rest of the voice. 3. Find Your Chest Voice: If you are not sure of how chest voice sounds like or if you think you already found it. If you're still not sure if that's really pure chest voice, we will do a very quick exercise, which is, let's place our hand in our chest and now just aim for the lowest note, or maybe not the lowest, but one that it's low and still you feel comfortable with. Let's just sing that in AH. So [MUSIC] that's pure chest voice. Did you feel the vibration in your hands when you were singing that low long note? I'm going to do it again. [MUSIC] There it is. I feel the vibration against my hand. If you don't find it immediately or if you find that the sound is too muffled, just play around with that note. Do it louder. Do it more open up. Whatever you need to explore in that same note until you find the most vibration possible against your hands. What happens when we go high with the same note? [MUSIC] At some point I stopped feeling the vibration in my hand. Why? Because I was not in chest voice anymore. When I was in that high note that was mainly head voice with a little bit of mix, but it was not pure chest voice anymore. That's something that you can do, just to control whether you are in pure chest voice [MUSIC] there's a lot of vibration. Or if you do [MUSIC] that's pure head voice and there's no vibration at all in our chest. 4. Chest Voice Range: Let's define a range for our chest voice. This, remember, it's not something fixed. You might find on the Internet, on a lot of places like soprano voice, the chest voice is from this note to that note. That is something that people give you to have something approximate, but it's something that you can expand and it depends on how you use your voice. I can do with my voice on a G, for example. [MUSIC] On a G4, I can do pure head voice or I can do pure chest voice or even mixture. If you have control over your voice, you can choose what to use in a certain note. Of course, when we say the region for the chest voice is, for example, in my voice from G3 until F4, what I'm saying is normally on those notes, I will sing with pure chest voice. What it also means is that if I sing with head voice on those notes like from G3 until F4, what happens is that my voice doesn't sound as good as it's good. Definitely, I would not use those notes with head voice singing professionally. I can do an example for you guys, but this is something that I would not do. If I do this note, [MUSIC] which is a C4, [MUSIC] I'm trying to put as much as head voice in that note and it's just weak. [MUSIC] It's weak and muffled. It's like veiled. Why? Because I'm not using the right register for that note. Now I'm going to use chest voice, the chest register, in that same note. [MUSIC] You see, that's much louder. It's much nicer and sounds like actually my real voice. The other one [MUSIC] might be an effect, but it's not something that we would use. It's not that we can do with other registers, but it's mainly in the region of [MUSIC] chest voice. I feel so much vibration there. 5. Chest Voice Dominance: Going back to defining the region of your voice where you can find the pure chest voice. I mean, the exact notes where you can try. For example, before I just tend to be flat but you can try other notes. I've just prepared here very quick diagram where either if you are a female voice or male voice that you can try these notes. Also depending if you're a high voice or a low voice. If you have any questions about your voice type, soprano tenors, mezzo-sopranos, just write me message, and maybe if there are a lot of questions about this topic, I can do a lesson on how to define your voice type. 6. Mixed Voice: Developing the chest voice register will transform your whole voice. I mean also the very high notes, the middle voice, all of them. Just to give you an example, let's do another very quick exercise just like the one before but this time we will start with the notes on pure head voice and then I will incorporate the chest voice. This is what a lot of people call mixture in classical world or belting that will be in the pop or even jazz and anything in the middle, because there are so many things that we can in different ways, in different registers of our voice. That it's a whole world. For now I will start with pure head voice on A4. Then I transitioned to incorporating the chest voice into the head voice on the same note. I will do it again. That was in kind of pop-ish style. Now I'm going to do the same thing in the classical wise like for opera. Same note. Head voice is like this very small bell that rings a lot. That was all mixture. When I went down it was all mixture. Did you notice when I started? Only head? Now it has a little bit of chest quality like [inaudible] . That's the chest voice. Is my sound weird? If you're not used to being around singers. But that's how we incorporate the chest voice into the heads. As you see that sounds very different. If someone is not paying a lot of attention or if you're a complete beginner, then you might think that I'm just singing the same note just louder but that's not the case. If you pay a lot of attention to the quality of the sound. [inaudible] that is pure chest voice as we saw before. Then I do [inaudible] . There's a little bit of that quality in that same note. If I remove that quality completely and I get no vibration in my chest. You can try that. Transitioning from pure head voice and incorporating the chest without stopping it might be complicated. It's a little bit more advanced. Try it. Anyways, I'm all about experimenting things. But otherwise what you can do is start [inaudible] with U and then doing it in A, because A vowel will call for the chest voice so [inaudible] . Also not pure chest, also mixture. [inaudible] I hope that helps. Let me know. 7. Characteristics and Tools: In this second part of our lesson, we will see the actual characteristics that we can use to connect the chest voice. The characteristics are very simple. We would have to sing loud, and we will have to sing a clear and forward vowel, just these two things. Whenever we don't find the low notes, chest voice is not coming, remember, sing louder and sing with a more clear and forward vowel. In the next topics, I'm going to go through the exact steps on how to achieve this. 8. Support from the Diaphragm : Let's go through the first characteristic to connect to chest voice, which is singing louder. To sing louder, we will go through three tubes. The first one in this small chapter is going to be, support. To call chest voice, we are going to support a lot of the voice. I mean, support because I don't want that by singing louder, we throw the voice away. We just [NOISE] [LAUGHTER] I'm giving you a bad example, but you know what I mean? Just like screaming it out, we would not like that. It's always in a controlled way and it's always through the diaphragm. It's the diaphragm that does the whole work. The diaphragm is the engine of the voice. I did another lesson on breathing exercises and support, and there I really went in-depth on how to connect to our body, how to connect to our diaphragm. So if you have seen that already, let me know what you think about that, and if you haven't, I really encourage you to after this lesson go and check the breathing exercises lesson. Because breathing exercises, at least the ones I developed, they are not made just so that you don't run out of air in a long-phrase, but especially to connect to your body. That really teaches your body, your voice, how to sing from the diaphragm, belly, abs, intestines, pelvic floor, whatever you want to call this region here, that will be the engine of our voice. So you always want to have that engagement there, that everything is happening from here. It is common sense that sometimes we think that low notes are easy, high notes are hard. But this, in the end, both high notes and low notes, they are extremes in our voice, and extreme notes need extra support, they need extra energy, they need extra airflow. We will see that. [LAUGHTER] The point is that you really need to sing them from your abs, from your support. No, [NOISE] has no energy, has no connection. [NOISE] From here [NOISE]. As much as you can, really connecting with a lot of support to the low notes as if they would be high notes. Same kind of energy, same kind of intensity. They deserve that because they are extreme notes in your voice. 9. Open Resonance Space: The second tool that will allow us to sing louder is Gips space up here. This space of dropping your lower jaw. I would like you to place your fingers on the corners of your jaw here, really the corners where this 90-degree angle right there. Just let it come. See if this is your upper jaw and this is your lower jaw, just let it come exactly lower and then backwards. Like as if it's a draw. This might seem weird if you're doing this for the first time, but just try it just below your ears, and feel those corners coming a little bit down. You unlock them and then backwards, and you will find this space here in the back that we definitely want to have opened, to connect to the chest, to connect to the support. This needs to be open for extreme notes as I said. Once you find this space here, you will want to leave it open and just let the air flow through that open space. If you are finding this difficult with the corners of your jaw, to unlock them and move them backwards, you can also try through the yawning position, the beginning of the yawn. Actually, the best exercise that I've found is that, just pretending that you're yawning in a very boring conversation and you just cannot continue yawn, so you just go like [LAUGHTER] that. Not that because that's not the real yawn. Or could also be, but really the best way that you feel this backspace independent from the space that you make in your mouth just with your closed mouth. Great skill to how we mean things. [LAUGHTER]. I'm joking. But really fill that space [NOISE]. Then mix sound through that [NOISE] as if you're making sound through the yawn. [NOISE]. Even if it sounds a little bit muffled for now just to find space, that's fine. We will solve the muffled-ness in the next chapters. Until now, we've seen that to sing louder, we will need a lot of support and a lot of space. Just one last quick tip. This space is never locked. It's never a fixed space. There's always an open space that you can always be flexible with because we will need to articulate vowels, consonants, everything and it needs to adapt to which note we are doing. It's always a space where you can chew, so it's a flexible space, but it needs to always be open. 10. Singing with the Airflow: Our last tool for singing louder, is going to be airflow. Low notes need a lot of airflow. They have the notes in our voice that need the most air. Airflow, I mean, really a big column of air coming up. We will fill our throat completely numb, like a numb tube with the open space that we've seen and through that open tube comes a very big avalanche of air. An exercise that we can do to fill this airflow is that you will want to send so much air as an exercise, so much air that your voice will even be on the breathy size. I'm going to give you an example instead of [MUSIC] which would be a normal chest voice we are going to train. [MUSIC] You can put more vowel, but [MUSIC] still a lot of air. Try that so much support with so much flow of air. This is hard because I told you not to throw your voice. Don't go and do [MUSIC] because then it comes in our throat. Always has to be the space open. Is like joining the puzzle. We will need the support, we will need the space and we will need a lot of flow of air. If one of these three things misses, it will mess up with the other ones. It's an equilibrium that takes time to find but I think if you try this small experiment of just trying a breathy voice, I tried to sound like someone that has rougher voice. [NOISE] Like if you scream too much in lots of little bits of voice, [MUSIC] hopefully, you notice on that side that I'm sending a little bit way too much air but that's the point of this exercise. That we teach the air to go through our numb tube without these coming into play, without this interfering in the process. No manipulation from the throat, and just a lot of airflow through that. 11. Clear Vowels: Now we will go through the second characteristic of finding chest voice which is a clear and forward vowel. What do I mean by clear and forward vowel? This means first of all that we are going to use Italian or Spanish or even Portuguese vowels. So these are A, E, I, O, U. Why do I choose these vowels? Because they don't have diphthongs like in English, for example, A is ei. Do you recognize that there are two sounds in there or for example I, ai, there's also two sounds in there. We are going to choose these vowels that have one core sound. Now, let's see how can we make them very clear. What do I mean by clear? For example, if I say a not clear, A, it's clear. Can you notice the difference? [NOISE] So that's the difference between [NOISE] not clear. For example, in E, we have, [NOISE] Is that clear or not clear? Now, [NOISE] That is clear, right? This last one I'm going to go from not clear to clear one. [NOISE] That was clear. 12. Vowel Exercise: Let's go through an exercise that will teach us how to do the vowels. Always clear, always articulated, how to articulate vowels. And we will see that it's all dependent on our tongue. The vowel exercise is one of my favorite exercises and always wanted to go to. I go through that with each student, which is teaching or reteaching ourselves how to do vowels using only our tongue. This means no jaw movement and no lip movement except for the vowel u, but we will see that later. For a,e,i. o, we will use only the tongue. This is a representation of the tongue. This is the tip of the tongue. This is the root of the tongue. Here would be the lower teeth and the tongue will be doing this inside to articulate each vowel. I'm going to demonstrate the exercise first, and then I'm going to explain that to you. We will want to place our finger here in the chin just to control the movements that there is no movement. I'm going to articulate the four first vowels moving absolutely nothing but just my tongue inside. Select this,[MUSIC] Did you notice that each vowel was really articulated? [MUSIC] There is a clear a, for example, the a. [MUSIC] Do you notice the difference. How do you change one ball to the other just with the tongue? This might be quite difficult for you or actually very easy. It depends a lot. These very personal. Depends also on your mother tongue. Let's just do it together. And then I'm going to use this hand to the representation of what my tongue is doing inside. Of course, it's just inside my tongue is just a question of half millimeters or like quarters of inches. But here I'm going to just do a small representation. Hopefully, it's clear for you. [MUSIC] I just wanted to experiment with that. Be willing to fail, make mistakes, try again until you really hear clear vowels. If you hear [MUSIC] the vowel is not clear is because my tongue is being lazy. It's just not articulating it in the right position. It takes experiments and time to find the right position for each vowel and I'm sure you can do that. Ultimately you want to be standing in the mirror and just see the picture completely frozen. If you control just here with your finger, you can just feel no movement at all. [MUSIC] Always with alignment and good posture. 13. 13 CLEAR VOWELS: Forward Resonance: We've come to the second tool on how to sing it clear and forward vowel. This is also going to be the last tool from this second section of this lesson. To make a summary, the reason why I wanted to include this last tool is because sometimes when we have this backspace, it's easy that our voice ends up falling into that space in the back that gives us a muffled quality in our voice. I don't want any of you to sing muffled low notes. Besides having a clear vowel which will help immensely to not have a muffled voice, another thing that we can do is this tool which is singing in a more forward resonance. This might seem contradictory with what I said before, which is we need the backspace; we want this back open space. But now I'm saying I want a forward resonance. The thing is that we need both. This all comes to the old Italian technique, which is about the bright and the dark; chiaro, scuro. The scuro, the dark, is going to be the backspace that gives us this out [MUSIC]. If I fall, [MUSIC] then it's muffled because I just let my voice fall into that backspace. Is that clear? What we want is a more full addressness through the backspace; the chiaro, the bright. Like this [MUSIC]. I'm opening the space and then finding the resonance here. We can say in the mask, for example, in the forward resonators [MUSIC]. That also helps a lot as I've said with the very clear articulated A vowel. The A vowel, just a very quick tip, is the favorite vowel for the chest voice. I said the favorite vowel, not of me, of the chest voice. The U is a favorite for the head voice. The A vowel for being so spread and so, I say open, so such a clear vowel is really, really good for chest voice. Now I'm going to give you an example of my voice on the two dark sides, two scuro, and on the two bright side, two chiaro. Let's start with the too much in the dark side. That's the muffled sounds. I open the space, I connect, but then I let my voice fall in the back, so [MUSIC]. I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to go too much into the bright side. The start will be [MUSIC]. I lost the space in the back. I want a mixture of both, like this [MUSIC]. Singing is hard or can be hard because it's full of contradictions. Contradictions, compliments. It's like all the pieces of the puzzle need to fit together and until we start seeing the bigger picture can be tricky. We need a lot of patience with ourselves, but it's attainable. Just try that imitator muffled sound. I think imitation is also a great tool. Imitate the muffled sound and then try to put the more clear vowel and think about this more forward resonators [MUSIC]. You can do with different vowels as well always keeping them forward. We always want forward vowels. 14. Declamation Exercise: Let's go through the first practical exercise that I want you to do every day. It is called declamation. Declamation is such a strong tool to develop your voice especially the low notes, but also in general to open up your voice and it can be very fun [LAUGHTER]. Declamation is an art of speech that old actors used to use. Nowadays it's out of fashion, but if you think about Shakespeare acting or old Greek theater acting you'll know what I mean. Let's think about an open-air Greek theater where actors would have tragedies, comedies but where there would be no mics of course, and so they would really have to project their voices. Why I'm I saying that this is a great exercise for chest voice? Because we want to encourage the voice become louder. With loudness comes chest voice, and with chest voice comes loudness. Those two things go together. Since I mentioned Shakespeare, let's think about the cliche to be or not to be. That is the question. I can deliver that in so many ways, but just in terms of vocally if I say to be or not to be, that is the question. I'm just saying that as my normal speaking voice. Now I'm going to try and say that in a declamation acting style, and that would be, ''To be or not to be. That is the question." Do you see that? "That is the question." Not, "That," but, "That." Forgive me for my English accent, but did you see that long vowel still in spoken voice, "That." Just practice that, make up phrases, do crazy things, write your own monologues, and do declamation out of them in your own house. For example, just a very simple one. I can say, ''Hi everyone. Welcome to the theater. Welcome.'' This controlled shouting. Just try that with anything that you feel most comfortable with, and when you have a long vowel try and make it even longer. So really long and well-articulated vowels,. For example, think that there is an h after the a. Like thahhhh with T-H-A and then H-H-H-H so that it's a very long a thahhhh. Now I'm singing. It's like very fine border between speaking and singing and that's what we want to find, thaaaaat. I went to speaking, but thahhht, now I'm singing. If I would like I can just transform that back into speaking, so thaaaaat. Did you notice I was singing for a moment and then I ended up in speech like in spoken quality of the voice again. It's bringing this as I said spoken quality of the voice into the singing and transition between one and the other through declamation. Declamation, I think is an amazing middle ground between the two worlds; speaking and singing. Try that, speaking loud; speaking in old acting style. Any monologue that you find, that you can grab, do that in declamation style. One very last tip; very important, use inflection in your voice. You can do. ''To be or not to be, that is thy question.'' Maybe that is out of context but we don't care for that now, it's an exercise. We want it to, "To be or not." You see that's much lower. I'm not singing, I'm still in declamation mode. So still in speaking mode. Find these inflections in your voice that will give you so much flexibility much beyond chest voice, but will definitely bring your chest voice higher and higher. And that's what we want for belting in pop like, "To be." I'm belting there. Did you notice that? This is really one of my top favorite exercises and I encourage you to do that every day. Let's see the next one. 15. VA Exercise in Chest Voice: We've come to our last exercise of this lesson and this one, I would encourage you all to include in your warm-up. I'm actually planning on doing a lesson, just some warm-ups, but until then, whatever is your regular warm-up that you do before singing, I would really, encourage you to do this, maybe in the middle of the warm-ups. Maybe for somebody warm-ups and some lips trills and tongue trills. Then maybe start with the chest voice. That's where this exercise would come in the warm-up. It's very simple exercise, and we will choose the letters, the consonant v, so v, and the letter a, and so a, and so it will become va why do we choose v? Because I really wanted to connect to your support [NOISE]. The exercise goes like, choose one of these notes that you find there in the range that you saw before in your chest voice range. Let's start in a note that is too comfortable. You don't need to know the exact note, but it is too comfortable in your chest voice but on the upper side. Then we will move down with the same pattern. You will see, like these [MUSIC] Often note, [MUSIC] Often note [MUSIC] you see as the lower it gets, the more extreme it is for my voice so the slower I do it.[MUSIC] That's a very extreme note for my voice. I really make sure that I do it slowly, and I really know what I'm doing when I'm going through that and then trying that from one note to the other. I'm not changing anything in terms of position, in terms of airflow. I give the same intensity to all the notes. Okay. What changes notes? It's just thought, so know, [MUSIC] I don't go low with low notes. I don't go high with high notes. They're all in the same place. [MUSIC] After this [MUSIC] you can do also starting up again, so [MUSIC] If you feel that your support is not still waking up enough like you want to really wake up your support go [MUSIC] each time from the support from the head with the help of the diaphragm. Then also this [MUSIC] also halftone down.[MUSIC] Halftone down? [MUSIC] If the V fails in for a little moment like it happened to me now, just go through it again. [MUSIC] Make sure that you feel the vibration here in your teeth in your chest. I feel vibration in my chest as we saw in the writing the beginning of the lesson and then feel the engagement from my support. These really wake ups to support the connection to the chest voice and the forward vowel, forward singing, still always keeping the space. 16. Share Your Project: All right, guys. This is all for today. I hope you enjoy this lesson. I enjoyed very much recording this for you. I love giving lessons. I love sharing what I've learned in my career, what I'm always learning from teachers, coaches, people that I work with, and bringing this to you in these lessons. It really makes my day to share my knowledge and see how this can impact people that are just starting out. Let's just share that in the comments, feel always free to contact me. I'm very happy to answer any questions and hear from all of you. Bye.