Case Study #1: The Belter
Courtney’s Story
Names have been changed to honour my clients’ privacy.
Courtney grew up listening to her pop idols Whitney Houston, Freddie Mercury, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey. She got goosebumps when they sang those seemingly impossible high notes. As she got older, she started doing impressions of her heroes, and she was quite good at it. She received praise and attention for her vocal stylings in this diva-esque style.
Eventually, she learned she has two registers, later she would learn to call them the chest and the head voice. She could feel the click in her voice as she moved higher in her range and lurched into the head voice. This was an uncomfortable feeling, so she avoided it. The head voice did not create the powerful and epic tone she wanted to emulate. So as she developed her career as a singer, she relied on the chest voice heavily while she practiced and performed.
Over the years, she started associating her chest voice with ‘strong’ sounds and her head voice with ‘weakness’. She developed a gratifying emotional connection with the chest voice and a shameful emotional connection to her head voice. Her identity as a powerhouse singer was tied up in her chest voice, and to sing in the head voice was akin to failing.
She had a very distinct "breaking point " at Bb4. At Bb4 her chest voice would give out and she would be left to sing any note above that pitch with a breathy and weak head voice.
She pushed her chest voice higher by a few tones over the course of her early 20s. She eventually got up to a C5. And under the right condition, she could belt it. She started to realize that if she tightened her throat and pushed really hard she could sometimes reach even higher notes in the chest voice. She would also break or crack her voice regularly, during exercises and onstage. This was embarrassing, but it was worth it to get those glorious high notes!!
Eventually, after years of this vocal abuse, she began feeling pain after every show. Her voice was raw and scratchy and had to take days of vocal rest after singing to regain her strength.
This is when Courtney came into my studio. She was suffering from vocal pain though luckily, avoided more serious damage like nodes or polyps.
We spoke frankly about her habits and goals during our first session together. She knew she had strained her voice. We spoke about the habitual movements that she did unconsciously that promoted strain like craning her chin upward as pitches got higher and tightening in the shoulders and chest as she inhaled and as she sang. She dreamed of extending her chest voice range and increasing her projection. She wanted these things while also learning healthy habits that would allow her to sing 4 nights a week without needing vocal rest.
Courtney’s Evolving Vocal Practice:
I explained to her that to reach her macro goal of a healthy, bigger chest voice range we would need to identify smaller productive goals first, to get the ball rolling. As her most harmful habits were strain in the chest voice and avoiding the head voice, I assigned her several exercises that focused on building strength in the head voice to balance the scale.
Courtney was not happy with my call to have her do vocal warm-ups exclusively in her head voice. She considered it the wrong approach, as her experience had told her that singing in her head voice was somehow incorrect. She simply didn’t believe me that balance was the key. She assumed that I would have exercises that would allow her to sing exclusively in chest voice, as high as she wanted, forever and ever.
She bailed on our next session. I didn’t see her for several weeks.
Fast forward two weeks and I get a notification on my phone that Courtney had booked another session. Turns out, she had been experimenting with some head voice sounds and doing some of the warm-ups I sent her. Because she was such an active singer, she already had a good handle on support and breath-management (which we will talk about in a few chapters) and applied those skills to the exercises in her head voice.
To a certain extent, Courtney simply had to ‘put in more hours’ in the head voice. She did so on her own and had an ‘ah-ha!’ moment. Her ‘ah-ha!’ was that she had been punishing herself on a few fronts. She punished herself for not being able to sing as high as her idols by viewing the strain she experienced as somehow ‘deserved’. She punished herself for her perceived weakness in the head voice by avoiding it. She told me about how she cried over her voice and the disparity between her registers. Her honesty was so touching and heartfelt. Her experience as a singer was built upon the pride that comes with being powerful and the shame that comes with feeling weak.
Balance became more than just about the registers, it became how she understood her own musicality. It became the relationship between passion and vulnerability. Balance was the acceptance that her whole range was valuable and that she was more than just a powerhouse singer, she was an artist with a gentle, strong, emotional and powerful outlet.
We continued with a vocal practice that focused on head voice development. Before long Courtney was able to use the head voice register comfortably and confidently with more ease and at a greater amplitude.
At this point, her habits had shifted, so we reevaluated her habits and designed a new vocal practice, one that still allowed her to spend time in the head voice, but also focused on health in the chest voice, where she was still experiencing persistent strain.
Because of her history with tensing in the chest voice, strain was her chest voice, chest voice was strain. It took months to reduce the very persistent habit of tension.
She started with bad habits and unrealistic goals and she left with confidence in herself, her skills and in her craft. By taking smaller steps and practicing patience above all else, Courtney is closer than ever to her dream voice. We created an evolving vocal practice that took into account her bad habits and made choices about productive goals that would help her reach her big picture goals.
I continued to work with Courtney and we explored the variety of tones and balances all her registers. We will hear more about Courtney in the next few sections. We continued to work her head voice and developed her mixed voice register that she can use to extend her desired range higher with health, stability and heart.
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