The head voice is described as the vibrations felt as sound that you experience in your skull or your head when you are singing at a high voice level. It is a non-strenuous way to enjoy the gift of your voice without straining.
Head voice is very easy to master. Musicians have mastered the art of manipulating their voices to work for them. Now you can too.
Any talent or skill one has requires effort, practice and dedication. The head voice, if done right, comes out as soft and unstrained. You can feel the vibrations physically with your hand.
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Can You Feel It?
To do so, place your hand on the top part of your head, commonly referred to as the crown and simply hum. You can feel the vibrations moving to the top of your head. This is the easiest way to learn how to sing head voice.
Another way is placing your hand at the back of your neck.
When you hum, you can clearly feel the vibration of the sound move from your throat, in a sequence that ends with you feeling it in your head.
It goes through your throat, mouth and ends up as the vibration of the cords you feel, hence the head voice.
Before attempting these head voice singing techniques mentioned below, it's good to have a solid singing exercise program in place beforehand. This will ensure your voice is already pre-calibrated for singing, and improve the speed at which you learn to sing this style of voice.
You can learn more about finding the perfect vocal range for your head voice here.
Spice It Up
To make the complete vocal exploration, one can vary their pitch.
This makes sound move and the vibrations change their location of feeling.
It is all still head voice.
The pitch variation causes you to feel the vibration on the upper part of your jaw where your tongue rests and the soft palate at the back of your mouth.
Tips On How To Sing Head Voice
Like all technical talents, this method of singing requires constant practice and exercise in order to maintain your skill.
Practice also helps in that you get better at what you already know.
With improvement of skill comes an eventual improved quality outcome for what you do.
Before attempting any form of singing, be sure to do a solid warm up routine!
Here are some pointers that you can use and get to know how to sing head voice:
1. Breathe
Sounds as easy as the process is.
Inhale deeply, hold it, and exhale. Fill your lungs and expel the air. Breathing exercises help all types of vocal training, let alone simply training the head voice exclusively.
Breathing is what gives you that power to hold a note and stretch it or break it up as much as you want. So take your time and just breathe.
Learning to utilize the diaphragm in singing will help you master breath control, too!
2. Relax
This is very different from the breathing exercises. Though they might be grouped together, relaxing is more mental than physical.
Relaxing is your clearing of your mind, focusing on the notes that you want to hit and consciously choosing to sing the notes. Relaxing ensures that your voice is not shaky and that you hit the notes in the right way.
3. Teach Yourself To Communicate In Head Voice
This is a very interesting concept of head voice. You can learn to speak and pronounce your words using head voice in your daily life.
Following this will drastically improve the speed at which you pick up on singing head voice. One thing to say repeatedly that is a good head voice example is “Not By The Hair Of My Chinny Chin Chin”.
4. Find The Voice That Feels Right
There is no need to strain your vocals trying to attain some pitch level too fast.
Every person has voice variations. While finessing your head voice, make sure you are not pushing your cords too hard. Straining can lead you to lose your voice completely.
So take your time.
Find the most comfortable voice for you that is open to improvement and not destroying your voice.
5. Sigh While Yawning
It may sound off, but this is an exercise that will help you in improving your head voice. This is simply described as a loud, overdone sigh. It is as easy as that. Exaggerate your sigh and just like that, you’ve done some vocal exercise for your head sound.
6. Listen To Other People’s Vocals
There is really no success for one person, by one person. We all need some sort of mentorship, direction or guidance.
In this case, you should go out and listen to as many vocal artists as you can. Every voice has a range that it lies within.
If you are able to identify artistes that are on the same vocal range as you, that will be a great step in the right direction. If they can reach some degree of pitch higher, there is a high possibility that you can do.
Listen carefully. Note where they breathe and pause, take note of how they transition and soon, you might be the one people look up to improve their vocals.
7. Keep It Simple
Humans sometimes have the tendency to complicate issues for themselves.
Sometimes, it’s not even a conscious move.
It is best that you keep it simple.
As logic dictates, you start simple then progress as you upgrade your capability.
Keep it simple, perfect it, master it and then you can easily progress it.
A good foundation reduces the incident of retroactive progress or losing the vocal power that you developed with consistency.
8. Hum The Letter 'M'
Can you believe how simple this exercise is? Just humming the letter ’M', with your mouth open and your tongue at the upper jaw where it rests. Just that is enough to work on your head voice. You can add the letter ’M' at the end of letter for variation. It is an interesting exercise. It really helps in learning how to sing head voice.
9. Smiling
Now before you start smiling at this point for no reason, this is how it works as far as improving head voice: If you picture it in your head that you are smiling, the palate is heightened hence making the air move around in your head easily without you straining too much.
This is a great method for improving head voice!
10. Sing, Sing, Sing
This is the eventual result that you want anyway so practice, practice, practice.
Sing like it’s your second nature.
Let your chords tune themselves right due to the practice. Sing so much that it gets to a point that, your head voice does not leave you light headed or winded. Sing until you get to that pitch level that you wanted.
Intuitively this makes sense, the more you practice the better a singer you can become!
With these pointers in mind, you can go right ahead and calibrate your vocals. Hone your craft and don’t forget to enjoy your vocal exploration. These are all the easy steps that will help you on executing a beautiful head voice.
Take Note:
If it is using a lot of your energy, you are doing it wrong.
Should you use a lot of your weight or use the chest muscles, you will lose your breathe. The chest should not be vibrating when you do your head voice.
If you do the exercises correctly and consistently, your vocal range will grow stronger (allowing for execution of beautiful high notes), more powerful and you will be able to hit the notes that your potential can reach.
It’s all about your persistence.
As the Head Editor and Writer at Music Grotto, Liam helps write and edit content produced from professional music/media journalists and other contributing writers. He works closely with journalists and other staff to format and publish music content for the Music Grotto website. Liam is also the founding member of Music Grotto and is passionate in disseminating editorial content to its readers.
Liam’s lifelong love for music makes his role at Music Grotto such a rewarding one. He loves researching, writing and editing music content for Music Grotto.
