Teach yourself How to Sing Higher
Have you noticed sometimes how your voice seems to regularly get fatigued when continually singing high notes during a song?
Or perhaps you have experienced difficulty sustaining high notes, even though you have spent hours of practice expanding your range.
The cause of this problem is not your range or lack of it however, it’s a thing thats called tessitura. Tessitura is in fact your comfortable singing range as opposed to your actual singing range – and when you try to sing higher than your tessitura your voice is singing outside its range and and at its weakest.
When you sing within your Tessitura – your comfortable singing range – you are more able to sing notes on pitch, maintain your sustain, and do so without any signs of fatigue in your singing.
Many singers can occasionally hit notes that are outside of their comfortable singing range – a Mezzo Soprano might on occasion be able to hit a high C when in fact their tessitura is more likely to be somewhere between an octave and half an octave below that high C. Normally a song itself will have a tessitura – a range that it is best sung in and if a singer is trying to perform a song which does not match their own tessitura then there is likely to be vocal strain placed on the singer.
One of the things you need to figure out early on is your own tessitura, your comfortable vocal range. Then you can select songs within your tessitura. If there are occasional notes that are outside your range you may well be able to hit those notes however if it occurs repeatedly through the song then you can expect some vocal strain at the end of the piece.
Can I increase my Tessitura?
Increasing your Tessitura is possible but it will take some work. What you need to develop is breath support and improve your upper resonance. Without strong breath support attempting to sing higher notes via your throat will induce vocal strain over time which potentially could result in long lasting damage.
The reason you need to work on your breath support is because it takes much more effort to sing higher notes than lower notes. You need good core strength in you abdominals and diaphragm, and you need to be able to fully expand your midsection with each incoming breath. As you breath out you need to maintain the expansion of your midsection apart form the abdominals and in this way you can control your rate of breath.
After you have gotten control of your breathing you can then start to work on your upper resonance, or what is also known as your “head voice”. First try to imagine the tone coming from right at the top of your head. Keep your mouth narrow horizontally but long and tall on the inside. A popular trick is to imagine that you need to swallow something unpleasant – open your throat so whatever it is cannot touch the sides. You want to feel the sound vibrations in your sinuses and the roof of your mouth.
Now it’s important to keep your tone light and don’t try to force the sound out of your mouth. Begin initially with the yawn-slide or the vocal siren. For the yawn-slide, first you inhale and open your mouth as if you are going to yawn, then exhale using the sound “hoo” or “hee”, beginning at the high point of your range and sliding quickly all the way down to the bottom of your range. Try to start each successive exercise a little higher than the previous yawn-slide.
The vocal siren is very similar to the yawn-slide, except that it begins in reverse, at the bottom of your range, and ascends upwards. Do the vocal siren using a hum sound. As your breath support improves in strength, practice the vocal siren up and down several times with the same breath.
Another excellent exercise is the rapidly ascending and descending five-tone scale.
First begin in the middle of your range and use either the buzz (also called lip roll or bubble lips) or a vowel sound, such as “oo” or “ah”. The pattern is do-re-mi-fa-so-fa-mi-re-do.
Begin each subsequent pattern a half-step above the previous pattern and continue in that way ascending higher and higher. Make sure you use good breath support.
Raising your Tessitura takes time and effort, but with consistent and persistent practice you will find that you are singing higher notes much more comfortably. Just keep practicing.