FIND YOUR CHEST VOICE

How to find your chest voice

You can find your chest voice by putting your hand on your chest (over your sternum) and doing an m hum. Make sure that the resonance buzz is felt right between the lips. You should also feel the vibration under your hand on your chest.

Then starting to hum on a comfortable note that you speak on. Start to slide up slowly. You should notice that the resonance (buzzing feeling between the lips) stays on the lips for a little while as you slide up through your vocal range. The vibrations will also be felt on the chest under your hand.

As you slide up, you will feel you get to a point where there is a slight shift in the resonance on the lips. It feels like it shifts up your nose a little. At the same time you should have noticed that the vibrations that you felt in the chest reduced. This is the flip or shift into the next voice (head voice) or the falsetto register.

When you felt the stronger resonance in your speaking voice area under your hand on the chest that was chest voice. As you slid up, the chest resonance reduced, and the hum moved more up your nose leaving the chest voice area. If you check this, you will find it’s around C4 , D4, E4, F4 area.

You now know how to find your chest voice.

Other names the chest voice goes by are

The chest voice is also called chest tone, modal voice, normal voice, heavy mechanism, and sometimes also wrongly the chest register; The chest register is an adjustment of the vocal folds and covers about an octave in range. Chest voice is a sensation of resonance in the chest area.

Chest tone is again not the chest voice. Although a lot of vocal coaches use it interchangeably with chest voice. Chest tone is a specific setting between the vocal folds and resonance that sounds like the chest sound. This chest tone sound is found in the chest register. It can be taken all the way through the voice. In other words, a chest tone can be taken all the way through your vocal range and moves through all registers.

Chest voice range

The chest voice range covers from around C4 (C4 is middle C), D4, E4 or F4 all the way down to your lowest note. Men and women talk in the chest voice. These are also the top notes of the chest register; I think this in part has added the confusion between chest voice and chest register.

FINAL THOUGHTS

So now that you know about chest voice. I would just like to say that I use the registers of the voice to help a student to move and blend their voice correctly. The chest voice resonance is just a very rough guide to reference which part of the voice you’re in. If you are dragging up your voice when you sing, then you really should look into registers. This will help you to fix the problem.

A little bit about me:

I am a happily married man with a beautiful son called Sam.

I have 3 passions in life, My family, my health, and teaching people to sing. I especially love to help people who feel there is something missing in their singing. If you are interested in finding out more about the lessons I offer then please check out my singing lessons in Southampton page.

Have a great day Dyl 

Hi, I’m Dylan, I’ve been teaching people to sing professionally now for 20 years! I love my job and helping people to sing their very best.

That’s why I created this website (vocaltechnique.co.uk) to help people that want to teach themselves to sing or just want to know more about singing. 

It’s been my pleasure to help all levels of singer to reach their singing dreams.  

My new singing course “How the Singing Voice Works” is below. Check it out if your interested as I’m giving away a whole section of the course for free in the trial 🙂