blending registers...

Ive been taught about trying to find your 'middle' voice, which basically is an even blend of your chest and head voice. I actually don't know the difference between falsetto and head voice, i know that falsetto supposedly is when your vocal cords are letting the air through in pulses. But i don't know if i can actually hit it.

Anyway, apparently theres always a passage between your head and chest voice, but by doing scales up and down we can lessen and lessen this passage until it becomes as small as a half step which is the smallest interval recognized in western music anyway. Ive had a little success with this as my gap between my head and chest voice is not as vast as it used to be, but its not as close as i would like it.

This school of thought on vocal training is everywhere these days in pop music circles. Not so, I think, in opera. My vocal teacher was trained in opera (though he works with me on Country & Western, Country Rock, etc.), and he has never even mentioned this business.

I am very intrigued, however, by your reference to the TONAL possibilities in building such a bridge. The intensity of emphasis on blending of voices in pop circles has always struck me as misguided--I would rather sing a single octave really well than have three or four octaves of mediocre tone. It seemed to be a gimmick, about as important as breaking a glass with one's voice, and marketed with a huckster-like volume: "Now YOU TOO can have a FIVE OCTAVE RANGE !!! [Insert sleeping icon here.] At best it seemed designed for people who can already sing, but want to expand their range--not for people trying to learn how to sing!

But IF as you say the blending of voices provides improvement in tone, that's really something worthwhile. I'll have to look into this. Thanks for posting--and I'd love to hear from other on the matter.

Best,
Jersey Jack

falsetto is the high notes that are easy to hit but are to 'brilliant' or thin. they dont sound like you hitting it with your 'proper voice' blended head voice is when you sing the same pitch but the tone sounds 'full' and controlled. its harder to tell whether its head voice or if you just have an enormous chest voice range.

as for "5 octave ranges' etc...its impossible as far as im concerned and the people saying it dont know what they are talking about. singing is to do with tone and how high or low tha TONE sounds...for example...if you took the ridiculously high punk voices of the singers from saosin or dashboard confessional etc and used a paino to determine what notes they were singing. you would find that some are the are the same notes as sung by pete murray or 'the beautiful girls' acoustic singers! amazed?? ... if you take me 'low' singing voice i can sing the notes that sound super high from the singer of killswitch engage...but they still SOUND low...

pretty much if you had a 3 octave range only...you would never use it all....because the notes in most if not all pop/rock songs fall in the same 2-3 octave area....as far as im concerned jeff buckley MAY have had a 3 octave range....but noone could have more than that....3 octaves means been able to sing a line...sing it an octave higher..and sing it an octave higher AGAIN! ...in 'full' voice, weak falsetto not included...no singer that i know of, not jeff buckley or chris cornell included ever did that....so 5 octaves? ha!....

I guess that comes down to subjectives... nobody can hit ridiculously high notes with their 'full' voice, simply because of the way that our vocal register is constructed, as we increase in pitch our the gap for air in our vocal cords gets less and less, if we tried to force the same amount of air through then we would blow our voice out.

But in terms of music i think a 5 octave range refers to the notes singers can hit, and if they can hit 5 octaves worth, then they are considered to have that range. But i agree with you in a certain respect, quality over quantity, we can all hit low and high notes, doesn't mean they sound good though.

a singing range is meant to be counted in terms of 'proper voice' meaning that classically anything in falsetto doesnt count. and even if you DID count falsetto noone whose ever lived has been able to reach 4 octaves let alone 5!

listen to Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge... he can hit ridiculously high notes with full voice (what my falsetto is) an yet hes is a baritone singer...its all training and a lot of 'faking it' or making something SOUND like something else when it actually isnt. check out the bridge to the song Metalingus by alterbridge..... :shock:

True enough--five octaves, if it does exist, does so only through some technicality of what counts as hitting the note. But I have seen such claims, however absurd they are.

These sites often speak of a voice higher than head voice, the elusive and mysterious "whistle voice"! Don't know what this would be useful for beyond calling birds! :shock:

Best,
Jersey Jack

Tim Buckley is said to have a bigger range than his son, Tim having a 4-5 octave range. Obviously, I've not heard every note Tim ever sang, but I do have one disc that freaked me out, because on one track he's singing around the register I'd become most used to hearing him sing in, then the next track starts and he's singing so low I really did have to check it was the same guy and that itunes hadn't gone on to a different artist without me realising. I'll have to take another listen to that.

But I definitely agree with you on this, the size of your range is pretty irrelevant if you (a) can't hit notes consistenly and (b) can't sing with emoition.

the main reason i want to blend my registers is

A) so i can hit the high notes i need to CLEANLY and not strain
B) so i can sing along to cd's of songs i like but are sung high without having to learn teh guitar myself and change the key

i thought i would add an update...

im finding a little more success now, iv come to realise that really high notes just arent ever gonna sound the same tonewise as lower notes but to make them as close as possible. last night mucking around at home i found i could (very barely) sing most of chesters parts from linkin park meteora...although i sounded like a cat being raped :S but in times past i had just shouted the notes and sounded really bad, this way kept them clean and pure. so i was happy that SOMETHING is changing, i found the major cramping in my throat i was getting has subsided a little and that the muscles seem to slowly be getting used to flexing a differnet way, iv made decent progress in the few months but nothing major, still, it gives me hope that in a years time i should be a lot better again.

Hey Coleclark,

You make more sense to me than a lot of what I've read about singing and similar things like this. I'd greatly appreciate if you could attempt to explain a little more in-depth about how to go about pursuing this type of thing. It sounds like exactly what I'm looking to do. Would you suggest just practicing switching from chest voice to falsetto a lot, as lightly and seamlessly as possible? Or is there any other type of practice that you believe has been making the difference for you on this front?

jeff buckley could belt out an e5 with serious power... and i know i heard him do some squealy stuff that's in soprano territory, and plenty of normal ranged tenor stuff, ofc. i'm pretty sure he could reach lower notes than me, which would make his range over 3 octaves at the bare minimum.
mine's about two and a half, three if i push it, but i don't think i have a particularly large range, so i could definitely see real singers having a 4 octave range.
i saw a tv show about a guy with the lowest singing voice. he's supposed to have a ridiculously large range, like 6 or 7 octaves, but it's almost all at the low end and not really useable or completely audible. just an amusical rumble after awhile.
i'm not sure how big that girl from the 5th element's range is, but it was huge. mariah carey has a 5 octave range, apparently.