Singing Hihg Notes:

Even though you’ve worked tough and expanded your range to sing higher notes, you could come to a point when you can’t sustain them. Or if you’re singing a piece that has plenty of high notes (as opposed to simply hitting one and coming back down), your voice could get very fatigued.

In each of these scenarios, your problem is not range: it really is tessitura. Tessitura is your comfortable range, in which you can sing the notes consistently, on-pitch, and without strain. The term is also used to describe the typical pitch range of a song or choral part.

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Numerous mezzo-sopranos, for example, can sing an occasional high C at the extreme of their range. But their tessitura is most likely an octave to half an octave below that: possibly from the A above middle C for the second A above middle C. If they’re attempting to sing a piece in which the tessitura is from high G to high C, they’ll experience vocal strain and fatigue.

The importance is realizing exactly where your own tessitura is, so you’ll be able to pick songs inside that range. You may sing higher than your all-natural tessitura, but you run the risk of straining your voice.

So, is it possible to raise your tessitura? Yes, but it takes practice. The key is breath support, combined with upper resonance. Should you try and sing higher notes from your throat without adequate breath support, the result is vocal strain. Keep doing it over an extended period of time, it may trigger lasting damage.

It takes much more breath energy to sing higher notes than lower ones. You should use all your breath muscles–diaphragm, abdominals, spinals, and intercostals–and fully expand your midsection with each inhalation. As you exhale, keep everything expanded except your abdominals, which will control the rate of breath flow.

When you’re breathing correctly, focus on your upper resonance, or “head voice”. Think of the tone as being vertical instead of horizontal, and think about the sound coming from your forehead along with the top of the head. Think of it as riding up in an elevator, with your breath as the mechanism that makes the elevator ascend.

You need to feel the vibration in your sinuses as well as the roof of the mouth (soft palate). Keep your mouth horizontally narrow but vertically tall inside. One voice teacher tells her students to imagine trying to swallow one thing unpleasant, opening the throat sufficient to ensure that whatever it can be won’t touch throat.

Keep your tone light; don’t attempt to force anything. Start with the yawn-slide or the vocal siren. For the yawn-slide, inhale and open your mouth as if to yawn, then exhale on “hoo” or “hee”, starting at the top of one’s range and sliding quickly all the way to the bottom. Try and start each successive one bit higher.

The vocal siren is similar, except that it starts in the bottom of the range and goes up. Do it on a hum. As your breath support gets stronger, do the siren up and down a number of times on the same breath.

An additional great workout could be the rapidly ascending and descending five-tone scale. Start off in the middle of your range and use either the buzz (also called lip roll or bubble lips) or perhaps a vowel sound, for example “oo” or “ah”. The pattern is do-re-mi-fa-so-fa-mi-re-do. Begin the second pattern a half-step above the very first and continue in that manner. Be sure to use good breath support.

With time and effort, you are able to raise your tessitura and sing higher notes much more comfortably and very easily. Just be patient, persistent, and realistic.