Hitting high notes in the chest voice without yelling or straining is a challenge for beginner singers. However, it’s essential to learn how to sing high notes without falsetto so you can gain power for your singing.
If you can’t help but stretch upward and break into falsetto when hitting the notes, here are some radical solutions to adopt:
- Find your upper limit
- Span your vocal break
- Breathe from your diaphragm
- Do lip roll exercises
- Practice resonance and diction
- Improve your chest & head voice
Whether you’re striving to reach notes like Jeff Buckley or Sam Smith, the winners of this game are those succeeding in mastering top notes with their actual singing voices. Let’s find the way to being the winner!
Why Should You Not Sing High Notes In Falsetto?
When breaking into falsetto, your vocal cord muscles will disengage. Consequently, the inner edges of those vocal cords can’t come together; only the outer ones do. This disengagement produces a breathy and light tone.
Also, once you use falsetto, there will be no more tonal connection to the chest voice.
Since you sing down lower into the chest voice, the vocal cord muscles have to re-engage so it can turn back to the chest voice, leading to a break feeling or clunk.
Falsetto doesn’t blend smoothly with your chest voice, while the head voice blends smoothly with it since the vocal cords are always engaged.
Should you sing high notes using falsetto too frequently and forget about your head & chest voice, your vocal cords will atrophy due to the lack of constant use. Over time, a wobble develops in your singing voice.
Indeed, the old saying “Use it or lose it” is never wrong for anything, including the muscles in your vocal cords.
How To Sing High Notes Without Falsetto?
The expert tips below will help you kick out the bad habit of using falsetto to reach top notes and work your way up to master those notes powerfully.
#1. Find Your Upper Limit
The first and foremost step is to discover the highest point in your range. Find it by gradually going high and higher until you can’t manage to continue in comfort.
So, your upper limit on the natural vocal range is the highest key you can reach without stretching your voice.
Using a piano, guitar, or other correctly tuned instruments is also possible to figure out the top note in your vocal range. Strum a key and match your sound to it. Continue until you approach the highest point of your vocal range.
If you want to conquer the higher notes above your natural range, it requires practice. So, we’ll talk about some techniques to sing the notes beyond your range without straining and breaking into falsetto.
#2. Span Your Vocal Break
When approaching the highest region of your natural range, you’ll notice that your voice quality changes at a certain point.
The deeper the notes you sing with the chest voice, the closer you are to your normal speaking voice, the voice resonating deep in the chest or throat.
At certain points, it will change to an airier, lighter sound that reverberates at the throat’s top or in the mouth’s back. Some people call this voice nasal, but that is not accurate.
The exact term is “head voice” – a thinner, higher voice since this voice resonates high in your head.
People call the note where this change occurs the vocal break.
Novice vocalists will find handling the notes below immediately and above this vocal break challenging. But with constant practice, learning to go over that break and perform your songs seamlessly is doable.
#3. Breathe From Your Diaphragm
Proper breathing is critical to reaching high notes powerfully. One of the ways to gain entire control over your breath is by taking up intense breathing exercises.
The diaphragm plays a vital role in nailing the top notes and is an effective tool if used correctly. The better you control your diaphragm, the better you can control your voice.
A commonly applied lesson is to stand in front of a mirror with one hand on the diaphragm, taking an inhale from the stomach. So it’ll go in and out when you inhale and exhale.
Daily practice plays a vital role in your improvement and helps you muscle the way up to becoming an excellent artist.
Repeat this exercise every day for 10 minutes to see how better you are at holding a note, controlling your breath, and how easier it is to reach the elusive top notes.
Remember that good breath control is exceedingly crucial to master high pitches.
With proper breathing techniques, you can control the note you’re singing comfortably and remain on it for an extended time without straining. That’s fundamental for singing successfully in the chest voice.
Usually, we use the warmer, deeper tones in our chests for speaking. However, as long as you have good airflow and robust breathing, you can adapt them to deal with higher notes.
#4. Do Lip Roll Exercises
The lip roll is a facial method beginners can practice to relax their lips effectively. Place each hand on either side of your cheeks, then use your fingertips to push the cheeks’ weight.
The goal is to ensure that the fingertips touch the upper teeth. That’s the most critical thing of this exercise since it helps eliminate any excess air that may be floating within your mouth.
Breathe in deeply and make a “brrrr” sound while releasing air out of your mouth through the lips.
During this process, your lips will vibrate and reverberate freely. If you find yourself sounding like a horse, you’re doing right.
Not as it may seem, the lip roll can surprisingly help improve your range and high notes. This method reduces vocal tension while aiding you in discovering higher pitches.
The more vocal tension you can reduce, the higher the chance of attaining high pitches in your song.
We recommend relying on this tutorial video to learn how to do a vocal lip roll exercise precisely:
#5. Practice Resonance And Diction
As said, smoothly hitting a note involves good breathing.
You captivate air in your lungs, then emit it through the vocal cords as you sing. These cords vibrate at a certain rate, and this rate determines your pitch.
The two primary factors affecting the tone and sound of your note are diction and resonance. For instance, an excessively nasal resonance will make you sound thin, but a beautiful one will deliver a lovely twang.
Clear pronunciation is essential for conveying a song’s story and message. And clarity in singing often depends on how you enunciate the words and your diction.
However, delivering perspicuous diction can be tricky when you hit high notes since you’ll naturally focus on pitching more. Please keep diction in mind when going higher, or else you’ll find yourself yelling the notes rather than singing.
Your natural pitch depends on your vocal cords’ size. That’s why it’s arduous to gain a deeper or higher voice than your natural one.
Nevertheless, there are a few ways to step successfully outside the comfort zone.
The first method is to practice scales while gradually going lower, not high as usual. This way, you can train to handle lower pitches more comfortably and expand your range.
Another way to increase your higher frequencies is to focus on the chest resonance.
Expanding the natural vocal range calls for a disciplined concentration on promoting vocal strength and monitoring your breathing.
When training to go higher than you could normally do, ensure to avoid jumping straight to the top end. It’s better to gradually practice warm-ups and scales to lift your voice to higher.
You can begin with scales topped with 1-2 notes beyond your comfortable highest note. Then, slowly work the way up to higher scales.
Please be extra careful when pushing your vocals. Overly stretching can cause permanent damage to your vocal cords.
#6. Improve Your Chest & Head Voice
To enhance the head voice’s quality, you need to proceed with two primary steps. First, develop a special voice called mixed voice – the head and chest voice combination.
This sound doesn’t come naturally from many people and largely depends on constant practice. Some experienced vocalists engage with it so flawlessly that we can barely identify when they shift from their chest to head sound.
Strengthening the mixed sound requires singing the note around the vocal break. If you want to go progressively higher, it’s necessary to get used to using more of the head sound and less of the latter.
We advise you to pay more attention to feeling where each key resonates within your mouth and throat and putting more stress on your head notes when going along.
Day by day, you’ll be adept at placing the notes wherever you want and shifting from head to chest sound very smoothly.
It would help if you employed your head sound to hit top notes without breaking into falsetto. However, beginner singers may have difficulty distinguishing between falsetto and their head sound.
The prime reason is that falsetto is a special form of head sound and will not sound as thick as the chest voice. Sometimes, you can turn your head voice into a mixed sound by mixing it with the chest voice.
The higher the notes, the more likely you’ll lean towards the head voice. But it’s not synonymous with completely ditching the chest voice.
You should employ your chest sound while focusing your resonance on your nose more when you blend the head voice.
Mixing and unifying the two voices will create a beautiful blend when you transition. Also, this practice makes it easier to hit top notes but deters you from breaking into falsetto.
Wrap-Up
One last tip for our readers: Mix lemon, honey with warm water and have some sips before singing. This healthy drink will loosen the vocal cords and make your throat feel silky smooth, making way for you to nail those top pitches flawlessly.
Learning how to sing high notes without falsetto is not an overnight task but is doable with the correct methods. We believe our expert tips can help you stay on the right track and make progress quickly.
