Have you ever experienced that awful voice crack that feels like your voice runs into a brick wall?
Well, congratulations! You've encountered your vocal break!
What is a Vocal Break?
Your vocal break is where your two main vocal registers---Chest Voice and Head Voice---meet. Or, in simpler terms, it's where your low notes meet your high notes.
Your voice doesn't stay in the same place for your whole range; that's why learning to sing through your range is called vocal placement. Your vocal break is simply the indication that you've hit that point where chest voice ends, and head voice begins.
First and foremost, understand that it is not bad to have a vocal break! In fact, it's just that way our voices are. But that doesn't mean that we can't manage it, and find a way to avoid ever running into that wall again.
How to Find Your Vocal Break
It's actually really easy to find your vocal break!
Try this: start singing a low note on "Ah". Now, hold onto that note, and keep singing up your range. Do this slowly, note by note, almost like you're climbing stairs, or imagining someone playing up the notes of a piano.
Do this until you feel like your voice hits a wall, and you feel the urge to push your voice through that wall. (But don't push!) Instead, you can stop here.
This is your vocal break!
Your vocal break is easy to find because it's quite literally where your voice breaks as you sing higher. (You can also encounter this if you start with a high note, and sing lower notes until you encounter a place in the middle where your voice jumps abruptly. That is also your vocal break!)
Again---your vocal break is perfectly natural, and it's simply a part of your voice. It occurs specificially because we don't sing all of our range in one place. With that knowledge, it only makes sense that our voice would stop when it hits the extent of the placement you're singing in.
Our vocal break occurs about 1/3 of the way up our range. So, when you start at your lowest note, about 1/3 of the way to your highest note, you'll encounter your vocal break. Since we all have different ranges, your vocal break will be at a note that it might not be for someone else. But rest assured that we all have a vocal break.
And also rest assured that we can also manage that vocal break so well that we can pretend it isn't even there!
How to Erase Your Vocal Break
We "erase" our vocal break by switching vocal placements when we encounter our break.
But this does not just mean we should switch to Head Voice (your high note register), because if we just switched to head voice when we hit our vocal break, this would be a very abrupt change.
We want to create a smooth transition between chest voice and head voice, and that is done by learning MIXED VOICE.
Mixed Voice is the register between chest voice and head voice. Check out this diagram below:
This is the route your voice takes through your range. Mixed Voice is the placement that connects chest voice and head voice.
Technically, mixed voice is not its own register; it is just a mixture of head voice and chest voice (hence the name "mixed" voice). Think of it like changing colors:
Check out these colors here. Pretend that yellow is chest voice and blue is head voice. What do they create together? Green. However, green was created from both of those colors, and doesn't exist without them.
Green is the mixture of the two, and it's also between them.
This is what your vocal range is like.
In order to smooth out the transition between chest voice and head voice (which is what causes your vocal break), we learn mixed voice!
I have a whole video on Mixed Voice right here!
This "Nay" exercise will teach you mixed voice, and it will be the key to erasing that vocal break!
As always, I hope this post helped you! Comment with any questions or with your successes, and if you need any extra help, you can grab an online lesson with me over here!
Happy Singing!