You’ve probably experienced it a million times: you’re trying to sing through your range… and your voice breaks. There’s nothing more frustrating than it. But although frustrating now, there is an answer! You will not be stuck with this vocal break forever.
What is a Vocal Break?
A vocal break is something every single singer (and even non-singers) have, and it occurs between your two main voice registers: chest voice and head voice. Your vocal break is simply where your chest voice ends, and your head voice begins. It’s just the place where these registers switch.
Chest voice is your lowest register, which is comprised of all of your low notes as well as your most powerful notes. (Chest voice is also speaking voice).
Head voice is your highest register, which is comprised of all of your high notes, as well as your softest and quietest notes. (Head voice is also the epitome of the voice we all use when talking to a cute animal or baby.)
If you start at the bottom of your range and sing up, note-by-note, eventually you’ll hit what feels like a wall, or your voice will sound stuck or strangled about mid-way up your range.
This is your vocal break!
Depending on your voice, it will occur at a specific place in your range, about 1/3 of the way up your range.
Essentially, all that your vocal break is telling you is that you have reached the end of your chest voice, and are encountering your head voice. The reason it results as a break is because chest voice and head voice are located in different parts of your mouth.
Chest voice is located in the front of your mouth, and can be felt resonating behind your front teeth. Your chest voice circulates in your mouth under your hard palate (aka, the roof of your mouth).
Head voice is located in the upper back of your mouth, under your soft palate (aka, the part of your mouth that raises when you yawn). You can also feel your voice resonate here when you hum high notes softly.
When you experience a break in your voice, it is because you are trying to sing high notes in a place where high notes don’t exist. It means that you are trying to sing too close to the front of your mouth, where only low notes are.
What you need to do is move your voice up and back when you sing higher, so that you are concentrating your voice under your soft palate, where your head voice lives!
If you are not familiar or not comfortable with singing in pure, isolated head voice (meaning you can just sing high notes in your head voice, not that you are comfortable with transitioning between chest and head), then I suggest you learn head voice first. Don’t worry about transitioning, don’t worry about your vocal break. Just focus on getting really familiar and used to singing in head voice.
Once you get used to both chest voice and head voice separately, that’s where erasing your vocal break comes in. Again; this break occurs from the transition between these two voices.
How do we learn to transition them?
By learning mixed voice.
Mixed Voice
Mixed voice is your mid-range vocal register. Technically it isn’t its own register, since it is quite honestly just a mixture of head voice and chest voice, but it is easiest to think of it as its own register.
Mixed voice is how you can connect head voice and chest voice in such a smooth way that you no longer experience a vocal break.
Here is where these voices are located in your body:
Notice that mixed voice is much closer to the back of your mouth, where head voice is. Mixed voice and head voice are very similar in feeling. This is why it’s so crucial to learn head voice first. If you do not learn head voice first alone, then your habits will keep trying to sing mixed voice where you sing chest voice, because that’s the only place your muscles are used to putting your voice. This will just result in more strain and more frustration.
Mixed voice is the middle of your range, and it begins in that vocal break. Since it occurs between two things, naturally, it can be elusive to find. Imagine it like chest voice is one cliffside, head voice is another cliffside, and mixed voice is a tightrope across them. This is what mixed voice feels like when you are first learning it. It’s a very strange feeling, like you’re balancing between two different things, which you are! But just like any professional tightrope walker, the more you do it, the more you practice, the smoother and easier it will become, to the point of not even needing to think about it to sing freely through your range!
To get an idea of the route your voice takes in your body, hum very softly from your low register all the way to your high register. Very softly! If you experience any break or crack, go even quieter. Breaks and cracks are the result of strain or forcing.
Notice as you hum through your range, it’s very free. It’s very easy, and you don’t experience a break.
Now, why is that?
It’s because of this: notice what your mouth is doing when you hum.
It’s closed, first of all, and your teeth are very close together, your jaw is closed, and your tongue is nearly at the roof of your mouth, if not actually pressing to the roof of your mouth.
What is the difference between this shape of your mouth, and your mouth open?
When your mouth is open, your jaw is open, and your tongue is a few inches away from the roof of your mouth, and you simply have a lot of space.
Humming closes off the space under the roof of your mouth, which prevents your air (your voice) from circulating there.
Notice something?
That area (under the roof of your mouth) is where chest voice is.
When your mouth is closed, your voice has to find a place to resonate and circulate that air.
Where does it go?
In the upper back of your mouth.
This is where head voice and the majority of mixed voice resides!
This is why humming is easier to do than sing.
So, what do we do now? Well, all we need to do is find a way to keep our voice in the same place it is when we hum, when our mouth is closed. Except, we need to do this while our mouth is open. But whenever you open up that space again, your old habits pull your voice back down under the roof of your mouth, which again, is where high notes cannot go.
How do we learn to keep our voice in the back of our mouth when this keeps happening?
By using what’s called the “Nay” Exercise!
The Nay Exercise
The Nay Exercise is the exercise for mixed voice, and it’s what taught me how to sing in mixed voice and erase my vocal break!
This exercise is special because we’re keeping our mouth in the same exact shape our mouth is in when we hum, except we open it a little bit.
When you do the Nay Exercise, you’re saying “Nay”, but in a very specific way. We want to keep our mouth as closed as possible in order to ensure that we keep our voice under the soft palate. What better way of doing that than keeping our mouth as closed as possible?
The reason we use the ‘N’ in the “nay” sound is because when we say “N” (go ahead, try it), notice that your tongue presses completely to the roof of your mouth, which is effectively cutting off the space in the front of your mouth (where chest voice is).
Now, if you smile wide (the kind of smile where you have crinkles by your eyes), and then say “N”, notice that your teeth are practically touching, too.
Right now, you are in the “humming” shape, but your mouth is open!
This is the key of the Nay exercise, and why it’s so successful for mixed voice. We’re taking a small step from closed-mouth mixed voice, to open-mouth mixed voice.
Now, you’re going to say “Nay”, but with your voice still in the same place as it was when you were humming softly.
This will not sound pretty!
It will not sound pure; it will sound like a very loud, bright, raw sound. It’s even a bit annoying, but that’s just because this is the rawest form of your mixed voice. When we eventually get to opening up that space in your mouth again, it will turn it into a very polished, pretty sound. But for now, it MUST sound very raw and cringy!
If you’re wondering why it has to sound bad, that’s because that’s what your hum sounds like!
To find out how to do the Nay Exercise correctly, try this:
Step 1: Hum softly on a high note (the higher the better; if you choose a note that’s lower and closer to chest voice, you run the risk of your chest voice trying to pull it down. In the beginning of learning mixed voice, it’s easier to use a higher note, further away from chest voice!)
Step 2: Hum that note (again - softly!)
Step 3: As you hum it, set up your mouth/face in that Nay Exercise setup. Smile wide and have your tongue press to the roof of your mouth (preparing to open your mouth, but keeping your voice in the right place).
Step 4: Open your mouth a tiny bit! Literally- the tiniest bit. Just even separate your lips a little tiny bit. Just until you hear the sound come out. When you do this correctly, you should hear a very loud, piercing, bright sound come out of that hum.
This is mixed voice in its rawest form!
Notice that it doesn’t sound good!
Again – it’ll sound good and pretty when you add in singing vowels and open up that space, but first we need to get our voice used to singing in this place, and the easiest way to do that is to prevent it from going anywhere except the upper back of your mouth (under your soft palate).
Practice this until you can do it easily! Then, transition into saying “Nay”, with the same raw, piercing sound. Then after you can say “Nay” without needing the hum as a reference to find your mixed voice, start singing “Nay” for every syllable of the songs you’re singing! This is what I did to practice, and it got mixed voice into my muscle memory so quickly. You can also do this over scales, but I found singing over songs a lot easier.
You will find that as the weeks go on, you will start being able to sing in mixed voice and transition between chest voice and head voice naturally! Without even trying, you’ll be erasing your vocal break!
This is changing a habit, and habits take around 2-4 months to become new habits. For me, it took about 2 months to stop using Nay all the time to keep my voice in mixed voice, and it took a full year before I could stop referring to the exercise whenever I felt myself lose the placement. Now, it’s been about 6 years since I learned mixed voice and I haven’t needed the exercise since!
But remember: if you experience a lot of trouble with mixed voice, if you’ve been trying to do the Nay exercise for more than 2 minutes in one sitting and you still can’t find it, stop and go sing in head voice. Head voice is so close to mixed voice, and it’s easier to find than mixed voice. Spend some time in head voice, and then return to trying the Nay Exercise. Keep this up until you can do the exercise correctly within just a few tries. Any time you experience trouble with the exercise, it just means that your voice is trying to use chest voice to sing mixed voice, which is why switching to head voice for a while helps you get out of it.
Vocal breaks in singing aren’t just common; they’re just a part of our voice! Learning to smooth it out and connect our registers takes quite a bit of time and practice, but you will be able to sing freely, and that’s what matters!
As always, leave any questions below, and I offer online voice lessons here if you need any other help!
Happy Singing!