#1 [url]

Jul 18 07 2:20 AM

Re: Bumping into the top of my range

Musiciano,

Thanks for your reminder. I will forget about going higher for now. I was mostly just playing around before, high spirits, yanno? The high notes will come when they come, and if not, then that's no problem either. If I reach a point where I can depend on all the notes that are in my range at the moment, and not gain another one for the rest of my life, that'd be fine, too. However, I'll find my way up there at some point, and whether that's tomorrow or in 10 years doesn't really matter to me. :)


Cuno,

I'm female. If I were male and able to sing up to female high C, I'd knock myself out from surprise, I think.

I haven't yet compared the trills with the vowels yet, so I'm not aware of any difference there. This would be interesting to try. So far, I've noticed that the Bb below female high C (as featured in the 'mum' exercises) is easily within my range, but it tapers off quite quickly after that. (And when I say within my range, I'm not saying I'd go out on a stage and sing that! I can hit it, but it's not that pretty.)

The tongue trills are getting easier, I've noticed that already. The tongue's supposed to be the strongest muscle in the body, so I'm banking on it that it'll adapt soon.

So far, however, I'm not even that interested in gaining range at the top. My main objective is connecting chest with head better. Chest comes a lot easier to me, and I once made the mistake of going on a 'voice training' course taught by a classically trained soprano who thought all women can sing that high in head. I ended up with 'Me' techniques for chest and 'opera' techniques for head, and the two don't mix. I've had more voice lessons since then, by a better teacher, but I'm not making as much progress on this as I'd like - she can't imagine what I'm doing wrong, so she can't really help me fix it. What happens now is that if I sing without warming up for at least 15 minutes, my chest will break into my head voice (or maybe 'SS falsetto,' since it has a somewhat breathy quality in it. However, it doesn't really FEEL different from what I do when warmed up, so I don't know. Do women even have falsetto?). After the warmup, the break is a lot less noticeable, but there are still some weak tones around E-G above middle C. One reason why I bought the SS programme, is that there are many mid-range exercises in there I hope to benefit from! (BTW, I'm not sure what 'mix' even is. If you connect from chest upwards without breaking noticeably, is that immediately 'mix'? Or can you blend from chest directly into head without passing 'mix'?)

So yeah, that's my main goal: being confident enough that I can cross the bridge without going all breathy and horrible-sounding that I would actually dare using head voice in the songs I perform with my band.