Three exercises to expand your vocal range

If you read my post Blend­ing Your Head and Chest Voice to Increase Your Vocal Range, you can see how using your mix (head and chest voice) can help to expand your range. Instead of over crowd­ing that post, I decided to ded­i­cate a sec­tion to exer­cises you can to start to do, to help con­nect your bridge (the “break” where your vocal cords tighten to the point where you are forced to stop singing in chest voice and tran­si­tion to your head voice register).

Let’s recap the two vocal reg­is­ters first.

1. Chest voice

Chest voice is you com­mon “talk­ing” voice. It is the “nor­mal” reg­is­ter that is mostly used and you can feel that voice res­onat­ing or vibrat­ing in your chest. Merely place your hand on your chest area and you can lit­er­ally feel the vibra­tion. This reg­is­ter will have more of a bright and for­ward res­o­nance, com­ing more from the front of your mouth.

2. Head voice

Access­ing your head voice involves zip­ping up or what is tech­ni­cally called “adduct­ing” your vocal cords. At this point, your vocal cords are short­ened and less air is needed to prop­erly sing in this reg­is­ter. You will feel this more from the back of your throat and will res­onate through your nasal cav­ity and vibrate in your head. You should never try to push more air and keep singing in your chest voice when reach­ing your bridge.

How do you know how to access the head voice? Some­times it’s bet­ter to lis­ten rather than to explain. Below is the right way to help you access it, and then the wrong way. Please under­stand that you may start try­ing to access your head reg­is­ter with the falsetto tone in the begin­ning. This is com­mon, how­ever just know that it is not head voice. Lis­ten to the dis­tinct dif­fer­ences between the two:

The right way: chest to head voice (Can you hear the vocal cords zip­ping up?)

The wrong way: chest to head voice (This is the falsetto, not the head voice. Very weak with no adduc­tion of the cords.)

Three exer­cises that will increase your range

Now, here are the three exer­cises you can start to do now, to expand your vocal range by con­nect­ing the bridge between your chest and head voice.

1. Head voice octaves (slides)

This is great tech­nique that will help you con­nect with you head voice and cre­ate more aware­ness of that reg­is­ter. It’s a lit­tle more advanced, but this octave exer­cise will greatly improve both your range and con­nec­tion between the two reg­is­ters. I’m start­ing on an A4 here, but you can start on a note that feels com­fort­able, that is just a lit­tle below your head voice reg­is­ter on the higher octave.

Head voice octaves

2. Octave arpeg­gio scales

These scales will really help to beef up your vocal power. Using an octave arpeg­gio scale (I’m start­ing on C4 or mid­dle C on the piano) sing the fol­low­ing after each 1/2 step up: Nay, Nee, Noh (like say­ing “no”) and Nooh (rhymes with “new”). If you want a real work­out, go through all of these in one key and then move to the next 1/2 step and repeat. Stop when it feels uncom­fort­able. You don’t want to hurt yourself.

Octave arpeg­gio scale

3. Com­pressed grunts (short­en­ing cords)

Grunts are good way to com­press your cords. When you grunt, use an “Uh-Uh” sound like your push­ing some­thing (or you have con­sti­pa­tion, one of the two!). Then, directly after, break into singing a note with the word “mom.” This exer­cise will help you to sing higher, stronger and with more ease, because your cords are short­ened. The key is to learn how to adduct and this gives you a tool to learn how to shorten your vocal cords, which is the only way to sing higher. Try these and build up to your bridge.  When you get good at this, try mov­ing into slides after the grunts. I think you will notice a con­sid­er­able dif­fer­ence in your vocal power within a few weeks if you do this con­sis­tently. That being said, do not overdo these or you will wear out your cords!

Grunts
Slide grunts

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