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Harsh Break From Chest to Head Voice (Singing Teachers)
I need some guidance with a 15 year old girl who has a really harsh break from chest to head voice. She’s been with me for over a year and has a good voice but we’ve never been able to smooth over that yodel from one voice to the other. But the other thing is that her head voice is very pure and sounds like an “oo” even when that isn’t the vowel we’re using! Any tips?
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4 Replies
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For the second part of her issue, I reckon if you make an exercise of transitioning between the various vowel sounds somewhere near the top of chest voice (e.g. String all the vowels together on a B or somewhere around there) to get an awareness of the mechanics involved, then slowly go up by semitones until she flips to head then keep going higher and higher. Once the mechanics of the changing mouth shape, tongue placement, etc are sunk in hopefully that will take away that unwanted op sound. Then take that into a song that requires her to go to head voice and see if it helps
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Yeah I’ve tried that over the last year or so :/
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pharyngeal sounds are often the best way to fix this. Also I suggest doing some “squeeky” top down exercises. Sometimes with these students if you start from the bottom and go up, the sound is too heavy and just breaks apart. But if you can get any squeeky sounds (like nee nee nee or ‘ee ‘ee or even cat meouw sounds) going at the top and bring them down, then you can smooth everything out. Say a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 scale pattern. Also you could keep her on bright sounds like ee and ae to discourage the oo tendency.
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Thanks! Will try that xx