How to Hit the High Notes Classical Style

Becoming a classical musician takes time, patience and practice. It won't come naturally. With the right combination of the three elements, no matter what your natural voice range is, you can expand it and hit high notes that you never thought possible.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Warm up. This is key to hitting any high notes. Relax all of the tension from your throat. Volume and high notes don't come from tension. They come from breath support.

2. Get to know the area in your voice around your first break and learn to smooth it over by backing off your volume and breath support and staying relaxed. Practice this technique until you're comfortable with your break and know how to handle it. Sing through your first break.

3. Extend up the scale. Once you've covered your first break, less than an octave above that is the next one. This one isn't as challenging to cover as the first one because of the practice you gained in smoothing the first break. It's also easier because of the very nature of these notes. As you move from your head voice to your bell tones, you feel the notes coming out of the very top of your head even more than your mouth.

4. Relax your voice and let out your bell tones. There's a little tension at the top or your soft palate. That's normal. Be careful to keep it out of the rest of your throat.

Tips & Warnings

• If your voice feels tired or you don't have as much control once you're done warming up, then you're singing with too much tension. Try some relaxation exercises from eHow's article on preparing your body for singing or yawn to lift your soft palate and practice maintaining that light feeling in the back of your throat.
• Depending on your natural voice range, your first break is a range of 3 or 4 half-steps between where you sing from your throat and when you sing from your head. You can feel the change on either side of the break but singing through those 3 or 4 notes, you're afraid your voice might crack.
• Bell tones still require breath support to project, but they don't require much volume. If you're singing in this range, no one has any trouble hearing you.
• Find a local coach to help your vocal development. It makes it easier to figure out how to fix it if you're doing something wrong.
• This technique is only for women to use. Men shouldn't try this because it could seriously damage their voices.
• In traditional classical singing, your chest voice is only used for the very bottom of your range, the notes that are too low to vocalize with any support using your "head voice." The break at this point in your range is more fluid. Be careful to blend over it through the right notes so it doesn't break or change timbre. These notes are different for different voice types.

Resources

• eHow: How to Prepare Your Body for Singing.

[elizabethaciril]

on 8/30/2009 Practice daily around the same time. Caruso always practiced after the noon hour. Also, to open the throat
you can take a nice breath and sigh on "Ah." Making a
sound of great relief after a hard task. The feeling also of how the "beginning of a yawn" feels inside the mouth opens the back of your throat naturally.
Also, shut your lips loosely and keep teeth apart-try
"smelling a rose" will also open your throat in the back. The "voix mixe" began in the days of Garcia -Paris
1850. He was a great pedagog. He helped everyone with
the Primo Passagio and secondo Passagio. Men and women
have to deal with the "lifts" or "bridges" (called "breaks" sometimes) to sing smoothly throughout the whole range of a person's voice. You have to sing by
sensation of how it feels rather than what you are hearing. Some singers figure this out easily and some
take years to get the feeling of how it fe...

[elizabethaciril]

on 8/30/2009 The comments above are excellent. Sometimes a coach can
hear things as well as a vocal teacher. One must be
careful in selecting a a voice teacher or coach who gives
you the feeling that you will sing better, throat must
never hurt unless you are experimenting with different
sounds and approaches for only a few minutes. Anything
that hurts is a "red flag." Warming up is so essential
with scales of all kind and "messa di voce." Elizabetha