5 Exercises to Improve Chest Voice
Elevate your chest voice with these easy-to-follow exercises
Great singing requires practice. But it isn’t enough to simply sing. Great choir singers need to develop their chest and head voices, making sure that they are capable no matter where in the scale they are. That’s why we’ve put together this list of the top five exercises to improve your chest voice.
We’ll both explain what the chest voice is and how to improve it.
(Note: For more general vocal exercises, check out this guide.)
What is chest voice?
Developing your chest voice means first understanding how it works in the body.
The chest voice is the part of a singer’s voice that resonates in the singer’s chest. It typically encompasses a lower range of notes and is contrasted with the head voice.
For people on the lower end of the register, like Bass singers, the chest voice makes up a greater portion of your singing voice. This can sometimes end up in “pushy” singing, but exercising this voice smooths out the notes you resonate here.
Top 5 Chest Voice Exercises
1. Vocal Fry
Vocal fry feels great, but it also does great things for your chest voice. Hold your hand on your chest and modulate your vocal fry until you feel a ton of resonance in your chest cavity. There is your powerhouse, the place where you can generate a lot of amazing singing. Getting in touch with this point and sensing how it feels to activate it is key to developing your chest voice.
2. Ah Vowel
The “ah” vowel is not always the easiest for singers to do. But once you get it down, running through scales with the “ah” vowel is crucial for developing your chest voice. It’s also a great way to warm up the voice in general, making it a versatile addition to any daily vocal routine.
3. Trills
Remember, these aren’t lip trills. These build agility by getting the singer to hop through three-note sequences. With greater agility, singers can use more power in their chest voice without becoming too pushy. In other words, it smooths out the chest voice, creating that butteriness that we associate with the best kind of low-end singing.
4. ZZ Sound
Just like humming, the “zz” sound can give you a love of extra support to jump into notes. Going through a singing exercise beginning with the “zz” sound also makes it easier to shift between notes. To really emphasize the chest voice here, try to use as much of your regular talking voice as possible. That will make this feel more effortless, but it will also make it a more effective exercise.
5. “Hey There”
In this exercise, we go even further into the power of your regular speaking voice. By tying your chest voice singing into this, you’ll be able to deliver notes with virtually no push at all. You’ll also be able to sing from a place where you practice agility all the time.
How to Effectively Train Your Chest Voice
It’s important to incorporate these chest voice exercises into a regular, daily practice. While enthusiasm waxes and wanes, it’s better to do a little bit every day than do a lot one day and nothing for the rest of the week.
Safety is key, and that means not overdoing it. Pushing yourself too hard could lead to injuries and other setbacks, reducing the amount of exercise you can do and even causing lasting damage.
Chest voice exercises can be a great reason to start doing other vocal warm-ups and general voice practices every day.
Finally, as we covered in the exercises above, a lot of the work here is to find your regular speaking voice inside the chest voice. This will unlock a tremendous amount of flexibility, agility, power, and annunciation.
Learn More Choir Singing Tips from INTERKULTUR
Want to learn more about improving your voice? Keep an eye on our Newsroom, where we post tips for choir singers all the time. Who knows? Maybe one day soon, you’ll be ready to compete at an INTERKULTUR event!
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