Chords for Voice Lessons - Head Voice Exercises - How To Strengthen Head Voice - Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy

_ How to strengthen your head voice.
Well, this is true for both guys and girls, and everybody's voice type is different, and
everybody's range is different, and everybody's approach to singing is very different, or
whatever styles that they want to sing in.
But it's critical to understand that there's a lot of misconceptions floating around the
internet that I would like to kind of just [N] bring home to roost here for a second, so
I can share with you how I built my head voice, and I have a very, very powerful, strong head
voice, and what it is that I did to grow that.
And there may be other people that have different ways, I'm going to share with you my secrets,
okay?
The first thing is there's this misconception that everything has to be loud.
Big and loud.
Or all of a sudden it's about struggling and getting to this big, loud space.
It's actually, couldn't be further from the truth.
In fact, when I first started to develop head voice, I started with really small spaces.
In fact, we're going to do this together, you and me, and we're going to do _ small vowel
sounds, because that's the easiest way to get a nice, bright timbre, that right ping.
Remember, ping is king.
That real bright sound.
So we're going to start on an E vowel, and I want to discuss this as we go.
Now, _ guys and girls, I'm going to stop kind of high.
Guys, if you can get up this high, and if you can't, just join us when you can.
I'm going to go down the food chain here.
Ladies, you'll join me now, and you're going to join me all the way in the registration
I'm about to do.
Now, [B] if I… EEEEEEEE!
There's, most people have like a kind of a flutey hooty…
_ _ _ EEEEEEEE!
This kind of real flutey hooty, airy sort of space.
Well, that's actually [Ab] really detrimental for your vocal folds, and it'll dry them
out very quickly, and you won't achieve this bright ping, ping is king, that we're looking for.
So what we want to do is you want to close down the sound really bright into the front
of the face, [Gb] into the mask, and we want to go [Ebm] _
_ _ EEEEEEEE! _ _ _ _
_ Nice and bright.
Now, as you get better at this, and as you can lean into the sound, and as you can create
more resonance for the sound, you'll [Gb] be able to go _ [Eb] _ _
_ _ _ _ [E] EEEEEEE!
_ [Ab]
But for our purposes here, I'm going to back way off on the sound, so…
And then you [N] can have derivations or percentages of, you know, the light _ _ EEEEEEE!
_ Or _ EEEEEEE!
_ Or _ EEEEEEE!
_ Depending on, you know, what song you're singing, or you know, mezzo piano, mezzo forte,
it just depends on what you're looking to do.
So join with me, but focus solely on how you can bring a bright timbral [Eb] sound to this.
So if you're really airy on the sound, maybe I'm up too high for you, and you might want
to start [C] a little lower.
So let's go to the next [F] one. _ _ _ _ _
[Ab] _ _ _ [G] _ _ _ EEEEEEEEEEE!
_ [E] _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[B] _ _ _ _ [Gb] EEEEEEEEEEE!
The brighter the better.
And we don't need volume.
By the way, again, dispelling the _ [C] idea that, you know, volume is everything.
Well, volume comes about not by force.
It comes about by resonance.
It comes about by doing this and growing the muscle correctly, in a way, where when it
gets bigger and bigger and bigger, when you add a little more strength [Eb] in the abdomen,
_ [N] EEEEEEE!
_ You can actually kind of hit it in the [Ab] abdomen a little bit, relax the chest, neck and throat,
and just relax into that space, and [Eb] resonance takes over, and resonance does the work.
You don't see me straining in the throat to do this, [D] right?
I'm just rolling into the sound, and I'm hitting that cool, God-given ampitheater of [Ab] that vowel
that I've created, that God created, [E] to give us the space in the sound.
So. _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ EEEEEEEEEEE!
_ _ _ [Db] _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[G] EEEEEEEEEEE!
_ _ [C] EEEEEEEEEEE! _ _
_ _ _ _ EEEEEEEEEEE!
_ [Ab] _
_ Okay, now you can kind of toggle back and forth, and go up a little higher or [N] a little
lower, but that sound, if you work it, and work it and work it, you're going to notice
that your head voice, or your falsetto, which is translated into head voice, becomes stronger
[E] and brighter and more powerful, and will match the sound of your chest voice, so that you go _ [N] _ _ _ HALLOOOOOOOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII! _ _
_ And you can go in and out of the passaggio, and connect and fuse these together, and have
a percentage of chest-head mix, which is called mixed voice, where you can decide how much
chest you want to put into the sound, how much head voice you want to put into the sound,
and how much you want to mix this sound.
So now, [C] we went on E, because E is a nice, bright, timbral sound.
It's [B] really frontal, and it's got a lot of good space, and [Eb] brings a lot into the
velonatal port, in the front of the face.
But the next thing we can do is U.
Now, U is actually part of the AH-OH family of vowels.
Now we talked about the family of vowels in one of our other sessions, and I don't have
time to go into that now, but if we go to U, we start out on OH, because we can't
sing OOH and get caught in the throat, we go OH-OOH really [Gb] quickly, and we go
[Eb] OH _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [D] _ _ [N] _ _ _
_ -OOH
_ _ [F] Do it with me.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ [Ab] _
_ OH _ _ _ _ [E]
-OOH
_ _ OH _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ [Eb]
-OOH
_ _ OH _ _ _ -OOH OH-OOH
_ _ [D] _ _
_ _ _ OH _ [A]-OOH
OH _ _ _ [Db] _ _ _ _ -OOH
_ [Gbm] _ _ _ _
_ OH-OOH
[C] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ OH-OOH _ _ _
[B] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [G] Okay, now, the lower we can bring down our head voice.
Now we've talked about this before at first.
We want to grow a nice, robust, powerful chest voice first, to be able to [C] betrust, and sustain,
and hold up our head voice.
So we've got to build the foundation first.
I cover all of this in Building Chest Voice.
This is a secondary thing, a complement to that, where we come back now and build head
voice as we're going to…
By the way, I cover all of this in my singing course.
You can check it out here.
It's called How To Sing Better Than Anyone Else, where literally I break [Ab] all this stuff
down for you guys, where it's step by step by step.
I can train all of this stuff [N] for you guys to help you build a robust, super _ powerful head voice.
Like, _ _ _ _ _ _ you can kill it, right?
And you can then translate [Cm] that on down into chest, and [Abm] then any kind of variation or derivation
or percentage thereof in mixed voice.
[N]
Alright, now, so we did E, and we want to do OOH, _ sorry, we did E and OOH.
We want to do AH, and AH is a little tricky.
Because AH, you want to have the throat wide open, and because it's a bigger vowel, it's
a little harder to manage up top.
So [Gb] we're going to go…
We're going to be [Ab] real kind of ginger on this [Gb] sound.
OOH _ _ _
_ OOH
[Ebm] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [F] _ _ _ _ [N] _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ [E] Now, remember, ping is king.
[C] Remember that really bright, timbral sound.
Remember [Fm] that the doctor wants to see your tonsils.
[E] Remember the yawning sensation.
Remember strength from the abdomen.
_ _ OOH
_ _ [B] _ _
_ _ _ [Eb] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ [Eb] _ _ [D] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [Dm] _ _ _ _
[Db] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [Eb] _ _ Now ladies, if you want, you can start this even higher, but [N] this is a pretty good mean
average of where you should start.
Guys, you can start up here too.
If it's a little too high for you, you can kind of join in where you feel comfortable
enough without strain to join us down, you know, maybe around a D or a C or something
like that, to start to build that thing.
The _ timbre, excuse me.
Now, one other really important thing is that as we're building this, I start out real gentle.
_ _ _ _ _ AHHHHH
_ And if that's all you have, it's okay.
That's how I started.
And then little by little, you can lean into the sound a little bit more. _ _ _ _ _
AHHHHH
_ _ Right?
Now, we also discussed vowel modifications, and it's really important because it's not
just AH, it's how that AH is supposed to feel in the throat.
So I have a whole [Ebm] section in my singing course called How To Sing Better [C] Than Anyone Else,
where I cover all of these vowel [Ebm] modifications, and how to get to that placement in [D] the throat
to where you [C] don't feel like you're kind of gagging on the vowel, or you're choking or
clamping down on the vowel.
[N] Okay?
Alright guys, hope you enjoyed this, and we've got more coming your way.
Till next time, peace out.
[D] _ _ _ _ _ _ [Bm] _ _
_ _ _ [B] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [A] _ _ _ _ [E] _
_ _ [B] _ _ [A] _ _ _ [E] _
_ _ _ [A] _ _ _ _ [E] _
_ _ _ [A] _ _ _ _ [E] _
_ _ _ [Db] _ _ _ _ [N] _