What is head voice?

As a vocal­ist play­ing the Mid­west club cir­cuit in the late 1980’s and early 90’s, the music of that time required me to hit some incred­i­bly high notes. The band I was in at the time was cov­er­ing every­thing from Rush and Queen to Stone Tem­ple Pilots and Alice In Chains. Need­less to say, I had to learn how to hit those crazy notes (take a lis­ten to Queen’s Bohemian Rhap­sody or Rush’s Spirit of The Radio), but more impor­tantly, how to do it with­out killing myself night after night.  The key to this, was to learn how to uti­lize my head voice and chest voice in a seam­less man­ner. Sim­ply put, the lis­tener shouldn’t be able to tell that you are slid­ing in and out of two dif­fer­ent vocal registers.

Falsetto is not your head voice

There is a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion by many that your falsetto is your head voice. This couldn’t be fur­ther from the truth. Falsetto is very weak and breathy. I use it typ­i­cally to add color. Kevin Richards from Rock­TheStageNYC has a great video on youtube that explains this:

I can remem­ber hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion one night in early 1989 with the multi-talented James Goare, who was my guitarist/vocalist at the time. He was always able to hit all that high stuff…Boston, Jour­ney you name it. A few years ear­lier, FM 104 (Toledo, Ohio) caught on to one of his orig­i­nal songs and placed it into heavy rota­tion (this kind of thing just doesn’t hap­pen any­more, unfor­tu­nately). The cho­rus of the song was very catchy, but more appar­ent to me, was how high his voice was. “How do you do that,” I asked him? He told me that it was his abil­ity to go in and out of his head voice.

So as time went by, James would encour­age me to develop this “new” voice I never thought I had. Strange part about it, was that you didn’t have to push it. You actu­ally used less air! It took awhile to catch on, but I started prac­tic­ing and using it in our sets. After about a year, I could really start to hear a big dif­fer­ence. I started singing tunes I couldn’t touch before. It was cool.

So the mil­lion dol­lar ques­tion is, how do I know what my head voice is, and how do I make it work? I’m going to defer this back to Kevin again.

As men­tioned by Kevin, when you hit the head voice, your vocal chords zip up, or what is tech­ni­cally called vocal adduc­tion. This voice is going to res­onate in your head, as opposed to your chest. The way you can tell the dif­fer­ence between the two, is by plac­ing your hand on your chest. When you sing in your nor­mal or chest voice, you can hear the sound vibrate in your chest. How­ever, when you slide into your head voice, that vibra­tion moves away from the chest and the sound res­onates in your head.

Most great singers use their head voice. Though Kevin uses a higher pitch in the first vid (rem­i­nis­cent of the old hair bands of the 80’s)– that is just one way to uti­lize it.

Find­ing and using your head voice takes some work, but once you catch on, it gives you an extended range that you never thought pos­si­ble!  And, when you mas­ter it, you can then mix both the chest and head voices together to add real vocal power. More to come!

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