I notice on the Facebook group there are a lot of Head Voice/Chest Voice problems.

We jump to the conclusion the Head Voice (or Head Resonance) is for highs, and Chest Voice (or Chest Resonance) is for lows - and this is true, but not the whole truth.

Resonance is like a train that passes through three cities. You can control the placement of the train, it moves freely up and down the track. You cannot change the placements of the cities (your physical resonant chambers). All three of these cities are in a Province, that province is your all encompassing voice.
So now we can see the whole truth. The train does not travel through three cities - it travels through a single province on a single path, through static chambers.

So now lets take this imagery and place it over the diagrams Jaime uses to show tonal resonances on pages 64-66. If you look at all the diagrams in succession you can see the ball of light traveling on the track - the ball being similar to the train imagery. The ball passes and moves freely up and down the resonance track, it can make a stop - or it can just keep going; it can swell and it can shrink.

Now look again at the diagrams on Pages 64-66. Look at the highest noted resonance, and look at the lowest noted resonance. Now imagine (or draw) them onto one image. Now imagine vertically, next to the image, a keyboard with your lowest note at the lowest resonance and your highest note at the highest resonance. Now imagine again the resonance ball traveling up and down the track - and see how the resonance ball can correspond to a note on the keyboard - it can roll up and down the scale. Resonance is fluid and moving. Use this to help you understand where your resonant balance should be, how it should move through you as you ascend and descend the scales.

This peace and fluidity, the floating ball of light, is the image that you must embody. Coordination and fluidity in transition are the goal - remembering that you have just one voice means the people listening only hear one voice, one fluid solid voice with consistent tone and tambre from top to bottom and all the flexibility in between for stylistic expression.


Yet another reiteration would be:


Let's stop calling them Head and Chest for a minute. Lets call them "Above" and "Below". Let's also say that your Vocal Break is equivalent to the physical position of your vocal folds between Above Resonance and Below Resonance. The "throat" resonance becomes a Blended Resonance with a projected meeting of Above and Below. We not only have these three resonances, we also have a seemingly infinite and varying combination of these resonances. With this we can imagine that we need to begin shifting the Balance before we can get Above the break, or that we need to shift the Balance before we go Below the break. If we wait until we are at the break or too close to the break we will have a substantial shift and cause a "blow out" or inconsistency (or stoppage) of tone. We must begin to Blend at the earliest point possible for the transition to be as smooth as possible. Remember that the places - the empty cavities we are resonating - are also physical and they are also above and below your vocal folds. It's my theory that our vocal breaks are caused by the physical change in resonance from below the folds to above the fold. As you sing a note the pitch requires a certain resonance in it's production - this tone of resonance is specific to an area of your physical body. As you sing higher (or lower) you must learn to shift and balance your resonance to the appropriate place of your physical self to produce the tone. SO when you are in chest which is only allowed certain Mhz of resonance frequency and you pull chest along higher and higher - well now the resonance has reached the point there the pitch can no longer be made by the cavities in your chest and must be made Above the break in the head resonances where the Mhz frequency is much higher. I can also do the opposite from head/above to chest/blow and I see that at a low point I have to abandon my head resonance for chest. By notating the area of frequency where the two resonances overlap (for example: head goes down to B3 and chest goes up to G4 - your blended resonance overlap would be from B3-G4) by lightly blending the resonances beginning at the earliest shared frequency you can avoid difficult transitions (on a physical level) and remove the audibility of transitions. (For example: if you start the blending at B3 then by the time you get to G4 you'll be mostly in head with a little bit of lingering chest - by Ab5 you're "all in" head where you need to be - with no break! Our lower resonances make wider resonant pitches, whereas out higher resonances make tighter resonant pitches which is why Jaime says the VOICE IS A TRIANGLE.

Try to relieve your folds from the job of "making tone" - Let your resonance "make" the tone and allow your folds to paint with it.

*Side note* I also found it helpful to imagine the diagram for TT's coming out of my mouth like I was holding a megaphone, on horizontally like a shuffleboard board so I remembered to power push and project my sound FORWARD to get louder.

I have taken so long to type this out that I hope it still all makes sense! LOL

Awesome! If more RYV readers would participate on here, it would help clarify a lot of things because new visuals can be even more effective for some singers than the ones in the book. Great job, Diane:)

Awesome post, Diane! You have certainly digested RYV and can provide others with examples to understand the knowledge we get there.

In my experience I don't lightly blend anything. It's a 2 hour+ power work-out to get that quality sound.

My chest vocal break was very hard at A3 being a bass baritone. Just the other day I hit some solid A4s in chest voice. For the longest time A4 was a very flippy-horrible mess if I ever went there in chest.

Now on this same day I hit an E5 in chest that sounded like my A4 from over 6 months ago. I don't know what the physical limits of chest are but it's like a muscle and you can stretch it out with practice--but who knows how far?

Also my A5 in full voice resonates in my throat/chest voice so it's not all-head either.

I do very little visualization beyond just getting a grip on notes with my voice. I tried the whole spiral/mask/ball/etc. and it just seems best to instead focus on feeling tone, volume, power, and resonance. You feel the connection and power and if it's not improving over the next few minutes then you're doing something wrong.

I myself imagine the voice going up and down a set of stairs that follows a path along the jaw and skull.

But I love your traveling train visual :) Great job and thanks for posting!