BLOG - Learn with Legacy - What is Vocal Balance?

BLOG

Learn with Legacy

What is Vocal Balance?

Welcome to our January Blog all about Vocal Balance.
​
So what is Vocal Balance I hear you say?
​
Vocal Balance is considered as singing from the bottom of your range to the top with no sudden changes in quality. 

The air and muscle involved for singing is coordinated evenly as you ascend or descend or even move about your range. It can feel similar in all areas of the voice so you may not even feel when you change between registers. 

What are registers?

The voice has multiple registers but for now let's keep things simple and try to imagine the voice in two halves. The top half and the bottom half with a bridge in the middle. You may have heard the word bridge used before. We can refer to the bottom as Chest Register and the top as Head Register.

The middle or the bridge is where the Chest and Head Registers meet and where a lot of singers commonly experience a break in their voice. This is often because the singer has not learnt how to mix the two registers together to find Vocal Balance.  ​

---

What is mixing? 

A lesser known fact for a lot of singers is that they are coordinating two muscle groups when they are singing. These muscles can change the thickness and length of the vocal cords, the two bands of smooth muscle tissue found in the voice box that vibrate as air passes through them from the lungs to make the sound of your voice.

One of these muscle groups is responsible for shortening and thickening the vocal cords and so responsible for lower pitches (imagine a bass note or the lowest, thickest string on a guitar). The other group is responsible for stretching out and thinning the vocal cords and so higher pitches (imagine a treble note or the thinner, higher string). So it makes sense that the middle would require some combination of the two. In fact the whole voice requires some combination of the two and this can be adapted but we will discuss this more in future blogs and in our online and in person courses coming in 2021.

How do I do it?

A Voice Teacher can help you to first discover a thicker Chest Register and then a Thinner Head Register, and vice versa, using a number of tailored vocal exercises or vocalises to help you to experience this. Once you have a grasp of this they can then teach you to blend the middle. We will go into more detail about this in next month's blog. 
​​