On Quora.com recently, someone asked, “How can I tell if a singer is using his or her head voice or chest voice?”
One “expert” response by a person who claims to be a “Piano, Guitar, Bass, and Vocal Instructor,” and who appears to have been involved in music since a young age (take a look at http://www.irvnelson.com/irvstory.html) was:
In untrained singers, it’s easy to tell the difference. Chest is normal voice, and it is used in lower and midrange notes. When untrained singers try to sing higher in chest voice, it turns into a scream. Head is falsetto voice, and in an untrained singer it sounds like a little kid.
With classically trained singers, there is an obvious difference between chest and head voices. With operatic voices, the head voice is trained to become almost as powerful as the chest, but the two voices can sound so different from each other that it actually sounds like two different people when the switch is made.
With most professional pop and rock singers, the break is obvious. Think of when Chevel Sheppard (who won The Voice last year) yodels in a song. The high notes in the yodel are falsetto, the lower notes are chest voice. There is an obvious break between the two. When these people sing high notes in chest, it is called “belting”. Many contemporary singers have good belting voices and avoid singing in falsetto at all because when their voices finally break into falsetto they sound horrible. Others (especially male singers) use their falsetto to their advantage, and it becomes their trademark voice (think Adam Levine).
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-tell-if-a-singer-is-using-his-or-her-head-voice-or-chest-voice
With some well trained contemporary singers it can be very difficult to hear the difference, because they learn techniques that eliminate the “break” between the two voices. The “Mix” method of vocal instruction is one of the methods that teach this. It actually sounds (and feels) like as the singer moves up in pitch, he or she moves to a mix of chest and head voices; like 75% chest 25% head, then 50/50%, then 25/75%, then finally on the very high notes 100% head. As a result, there is no break, and the transition sounds completely natural. Some pop and rock singers found this on their own back in the day (think David Gates) and more and more are finding it now, with help from instructors knowledgeable in the technique.
Using the term falsetto and head voice as equivalent is potentially confusing, as we see in his comment, when he talks about a mix of “chest” and “head.” There is no such thing. You can go back and forth between the two, such as in yodeling, but he mentions that and understands what it is. It is also not necessary to go from chest voice to yelling/screaming if you don’t have “proper”/operatic technique. You can lighten up a bit, especially if you use microphones (unlike in traditional opera), but that doesn’t get you much higher. If you are an adult male with a tenor-ish voice, your chest voice will tend to sound better in most pop songs but without proper technique, you won’t likely have more than a couple of tones on a baritone-ish (or lower) adult male pop singer’s voice. There are some natural male counter-tenors, but they are so rare as to be not be worth going into detail about them here.
Next, no there is no obvious break in opera singers’ voices – that’s one of the key points of Bel Canto, for goodness sake. Yes , if you were talking to a male opera singer and asked him to sing as he usually does (assuming he’s not a counter-tenor/falsettist), then to sing in falsetto, sure you’d hear the difference, but they don’t do that in professional performances, and there are only a few operas in which that sort of thing is done, for comedic effect. What this “expert” doesn’t seem to understand are the muscles involved. For falsetto (what he calls head voice, apparently) you use the crico-thyroid muscles. For “fry” you use the vocalis or thyro-arytennoids (there is some debate but for the purposes here, there’s no need to “get technical”). In any other kind of singing recognizable as such, you would use a mix of the two (in yodelling, you go from all crico-thyroid to a vocalis/crico-thyroid mix, back and forth). The reason so many pop singers yell/scream when they go higher is that they sort of lose their grip on the crico-thyroids because they have not developed them properly and coordinated them with the vocalis.
As to “belting,” this can be confusing too. Many if not most female pop singers these days actually sound “screechy” when they go higher, which of course is not good for the vocal cords, but it is “cleaned up” with technology. I’ve cited examples of this on more than one previous post here. Belting safely probably best refers to someone who can go up and down in their range without screeching or yelling and who have a “decent” range (more than an octave, though for male pop singers one octave should be plenty, then one can “flip” into falsetto, which seems to be fashionable these days). When I go up to the highest notes in my range I allow the crico-thyroids to really take over (and avoid going into falsetto, because I don’t personally like that sound and plenty of others have already used “flipping”), so I have power but I’m not yelling. For most people, I’d guess it will take a year or two to develop this, or more (such as if you can’t do much practicing).
This “expert” seems to think that “mixed voice” means that the singer has learned to incorporate falsetto into chest voice, but if you try to do this you may damage your vocal cords, and this is the main reason why I decided to write up a post about this claims. He mentions pop singer David Gates, who sounds like he has a tenor-ish voice, but note that Gates sings in a mellow way, without belting, so he’s still vocalis-dominant, as most pop singers are, but goes higher with less power (since amplification allows it) and has good musicality. Gates seems to be a good example of maximizing his tenor-ish chest voice, but this does mean he has developed and coordinated his vocalis and crico-thyroid muscles, though it’s possible he did but just didn’t use that ability due to his song choices. Here’s an example of his singing from the period the expert mentioned:
Note that as of this date I am still offering a free first lesson/assessment with absolutely no obligation of any kind. Just email me: nickspinner@gmail.com. Also, I won’t give your personal information to anyone else. I might reference your singing on some blog posts if you provide me with audio clips, so let me know if you don’t want me to do that, but remember that the idea is to help aspiring singers! If you have publicly posted on sites like Youtube or Soundcloud, I’ll assume it’s okay to link to those in a blog post.
Learning to sing (with microphones) 