Advice on register transition

I have been working on it for years, but often find it difficult transitioning from chest to head voice, and even moreso, from head to chest.

Moving between chest and false is pretty easy, for me, but I just can't engage or release the upper throat hitch fast enough in head voice.

Any tips?

You know, I have no tips for you, but at least you know you HAVE different registers...I on the other hand cannot even FIND my chest voice, and because of that, I don't really have much trouble transitioning...I used to think this was cause I was "good", but now I know it's cause I just don't ever use my chest voice. *mope* lol

Conventional wisdom is to try to keep a mix of falsetto and chest going most of the time -- "mixed voice". Boom out the occasional low note or passage in full chest, or use pure falsetto on the highest notes, but otherwise, keep all your larynx muscles engaged to one degree or another, most of the time.

As to *how* to do that... well, there is endless advice and exercises... but ultimately it comes down to just practicing and figuring it out for yourself, in my opinion.

This exercise has been helpful to me:

Find the lowest note of your entire range, and slowly slide all the way up to the highest note you can hit, immitating a siren (tornado warning bell, fire truck, etc.) You'll feel the vibrations move from your chest, slowly up your throat, and then into your head. Try to keep the volume/ tone consitent as you slide it up. It might help to just hum it first. Do this a handful of times.

Then, with the siren in mind, find the two notes where your voice flips, and slide between them so you can feel the smooth transition that happens there. You can start a few pitches lower and end a few higher, as well.

Hope this helps.

This exercise has been helpful to me: Find the lowest note of your entire range, and slowly slide all the way up to the highest note you can hit, immitating a siren (tornado warning bell, fire truck, etc.) You'll feel the vibrations move from your chest, slowly up your throat, and then into your head. Try to keep the volume/ tone consitent as you slide it up. It might help to just hum it first. Do this a handful of times. Then, with the siren in mind, find the two notes where your voice flips, and slide between them so you can feel the smooth transition that happens there. You can start a few pitches lower and end a few higher, as well. Hope this helps.

Yes, this is definitely a good exercise. I usually do this one as a warm-up, its way more effective than "lip bubbles" IMO. Some say that you can instantly find the proper register balance from doing this. But make sure not to do this exercise with a heavy loud sound, if you do, then you're forcing up chest voice. I noticed this exercise being more fulfilling for me now, ever since I started practicing the "rounding of vowels".

This exercise has been helpful to me: Find the lowest note of your entire range, and slowly slide all the way up to the highest note you can hit, immitating a siren (tornado warning bell, fire truck, etc.) You'll feel the vibrations move from your chest, slowly up your throat, and then into your head. Try to keep the volume/ tone consitent as you slide it up. It might help to just hum it first. Do this a handful of times. Then, with the siren in mind, find the two notes where your voice flips, and slide between them so you can feel the smooth transition that happens there. You can start a few pitches lower and end a few higher, as well. Hope this helps.

Ooo, this sounds good. Thanks for sharing it!

This is important. When you're trying to work on this stuff, it's easier to make the right coordinations if you lighten up your voice.

If I'm finding on any particular day I'm having a lot of trouble with it, I'll use a lighter voice to slowly creep up towards where the change would be and try ease my way across it without any noticeable break, and then back down over it, and repeat. Working specifically on the notes surrounding where the change is and just going through that changes over and over helps I guess lock it into a sort of muscle memory for me.

Love the suggestions, I actually warm up on the way to gigs with your siren technique, CG...just can't get that "hitch" out of the transition, no matter how much I work on it.

I generally just try to avoid the transition "area" - for me it's usually between G and A4 (depending on how "good" my voice is, that day).

So if need to hit those particular pitches, and depending on what kind of song it is, I'll either load up on the air and hit them in full voice, or drop my head voice to around E or F4, and use mic technique to make it sound more natural.

Just can't do it smoothly, though - but thank you for the ideas.

Well I think you are talking about the transition between mixed voice and falsetto, using my terminology (everyone's appears to be different).

In that case I have two specific suggestions:

- You could keep working on extending your mixed voice range. I found that singing triplets in either whole tones or half tones worked well for me, starting from C4 and working up a whole step (or half step) to start each triplet. While I could barely sing an E4 in mixed voice at first, now I feel confident up to C5 in mixed (if my voice is feeling good).

- For the transition area (whatever it ends up being) I'll take the slightest pause - more mental than anything - before changing mode. It's much easier that trying to glide/sustain, and I'd be surprised if anyone noticed/cared since the timbre of my voice is changing in any case.

I rarely use false...maybe when doing a backing vocal, but then it's usually pretty high, so I just stay in false.

I'm talking about transitioning into and out of head voice.

Ummm... transitioning to what? Because if you can sing an A4 in chest-only, we are living in different universes...

Well, like I said - that's on a real good day.

But I do hit G4 on a consistent basis...strong and clear...no mixed voice.

I only use mixed voice for my "blues tone", like on the clip in my sig line.

My full range goes from E2 - usually...sometimes it's closer to G2, depending on how loose I am.

I have hit the Ike Turner "...rollin' on the ri-ver" D2, on occasion, but I may have had a cold, or something, at the time, and it involved some mic technique, as well ("tunneling" an SM-57).

Sometimes I can fry those lower notes and get that Conway Twitty sub-octave.

My head voice goes up to G5, consistently (think of the opening Ian Gillan howl on "Highway Star", and if I do a lot of vocal stretches during a week, I can get it to B5.

(I have hit C6, in a quick yelp, but it's definitely not musical).

I can also do the inhaled "Prince/Roger Waters" scream, but I am not sure how high those are, pitch-wise.

Nice range!

It's hard to know exactly what we are discussing at this point, since all these voice mode terms are so imprecise.

Anyway, I'll stop there. Maybe try the idea I mentioned above of taking a slight pause, when you realize you are about to switch voice modes.

This exercise has been helpful to me: Find the lowest note of your entire range, and slowly slide all the way up to the highest note you can hit, immitating a siren (tornado warning bell, fire truck, etc.) You'll feel the vibrations move from your chest, slowly up your throat, and then into your head. Try to keep the volume/ tone consitent as you slide it up. It might help to just hum it first. Do this a handful of times. Then, with the siren in mind, find the two notes where your voice flips, and slide between them so you can feel the smooth transition that happens there. You can start a few pitches lower and end a few higher, as well. Hope this helps.

This is something I have trouble with. I can easily find the two notes where my voice flips, but I can never get that "smooth transition" you mentioned. How do you do that? It seems if I tense my throat muscles and push the tone in my nasal cavity, this smooths the transition a little bit, but I have no idea if this is totally off-base or somewhat correct?

Nice range! It's hard to know exactly what we are discussing at this point, since all these voice mode terms are so imprecise. .

Well there doesn't seem to be much agreement about terminology or what to call different voices among teachers of voice. Roger Love uses "middle voice" but two different voice teachers I had never used it. One teacher said upper and lower register, never used the word "mask" whereas the other uses "mask" but doesn't like the term "register" and half the time he refuses to use a term at all and that blended-register/mixed voice is just "whatever you want to call it." This indicates major disagreement on in various theories of voice instruction.

Similar things go on in drumming, and it's a PITA to try to ask a question and set off a huge discussion over terminology because I said "press roll" instead of "buzz roll" or whatever.

Ya know, I remember having issues with that at one time. I'm pretty sure it was this excercise that fixed it for me. I don't notice tensing my throat muscles as I go up, but definitely directing (I personally wouldn't say ' pushing') the tone into the nasal cavity (sinuses behind my eyes, it seems, at the highest).

Maybe you could try singing "Somewhere" in somewhere over the rainbow (octave leap) and just 'roll it up similar to the siren.' Literally, I can feel the tone starting in my chest and very smoothly moving up my esophogas, up past my throat, and landing pretty much at ear level an octave later. I think, for me, that focusing on where the tone resonates within allows me to not focus so much on the vocal cords, keeping them relaxed.

I wish I had some better explanation/advice about it.

I asked my teacher how to get through the transition, and he said you back off the air and raise your larynx, slightly, the only time you're supposed to do that. But it's easier said than done.

And from what I gather, pushing the tone into your nasal cavity, assuming you mean the whole "mask" area, is always good as long has you have proper support. My teacher had me do exercise singing eeee and making it as nasal as possible just to get that feeling.

Grace, I recall hearing a C#3 or something around that note in one of your recordings. A woman with a normal voice can NOT have sung that note in anything but chest voice.

So there you go, you have a chest voice.