I've been reading a lot lately about how some people are able to get into their upper range easier using Brett Manning's "No Support" rule. I messed with that a little bit and found that I could hit an A4 easily with that technique.

But I was wondering, what if you do a siren with no or very little support, and once you get to the top note, add the support to make the note stronger without the ease or quality declining?

I only tried that once or twice today, but to me it seems that this would almost teach how to support correctly without the throat clenching up. Otherwise, the top note would start to crack and you would start to strain. I also think that maybe it would help with bridging into head voice.

your talking about transcending tone dude!
interesting man. did you notice how when you siren up with no support your voice doesn't crack or flip it just goes through its natural changes? unfortunately the power isn't there, maybe its a case of adding support slowly as opposed to just jumping right into a hard support? did your a4 sound like a falsetto but "feel" like a connected full tone? this is what i'm experiencing, let me know if its the same for you

my conclusion for my own personal training now, is that for me, its better to do brett mannings stuff to learn to develop good technique to sing freely in my range, then work on adding power by working with jaimes stuff. i'm going to "ramp into" jaimes stuff rather than go straight from soft brett manning stuff to hard jaime stuff. easing in the support rather than slamming back into the way i was doing it. this is my personal method atm. i've gone back to singing songs very softly and found i could hit all the notes i'd ever want to hit, yeah there was no power and sounded crap but it was all connected. least i know i can do it now its a matter of over many months developing the power to get those notes sounding awesome.

before when i used to do transcending tone i'd really try and get it to full voice, at the cost of technique. now i'm just slowly ramping in to where if i put any more support it's gonna feel too much, its like the more support i add the more it "weighs me down" making it harder. i'm finding a middleground where it sounds good and doesn't weigh me down as much.

Haha, when I was writing that I really started to think that it sounded a lot like Transcending Tone, but instead of starting in falsetto, I just sirened up and then added support.

I'm gonna try this more tomorrow, but just the little I did of it today, it seemed like it might be a useful exercise to get a connected voice and more powerful notes in the upper range.