It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice

One of the things that is often overlooked by singers is the importance of chest voice — the bottom end of the voice. It’s the place under-confident beginners tend to hide in, and the thing more advanced singers think they’ve “got sorted”… only to run away from it in every song chasing high notes.

I know what you’re thinking: “Yea yea yea Mark, we GET that chest voice matters.” Well, hold that thought — there’s more to it than we’ve covered so far.

So critical is the role of chest voice in full and total vocal development that it’s not overstating it to say:

“It all starts and ends with chest voice.”

OK Mark, that’s a little dramatic.

Maybe. But the concept is huge — and rather than squeeze it into a single post, we’re breaking it down into three core aspects:

Sonically
Technically
Psychologically

By the end of this, you should understand why chest voice shouldn’t be neglected — and how it’s the key to unlocking great tone across your whole range.

1. It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice… Sonically

We are all “experienced” at hearing voices. Since birth, we’ve been listening to people speak — and where do people speak from? Their chest voice.

This creates a powerful unconscious sonic benchmark. We instinctively know what a normal, grounded voice sounds like. So when someone sings with tone that diverges from this benchmark — whether too light, too shouty, or simply disconnected — it stands out. It sounds off, even if we can’t articulate why.

When a singer hits high notes that still sound like their chest voice, the audience feels a natural continuity. It’s not about staying in chest voice the whole time — it’s about preserving its tonal integrity as you move through your range.

Congruency, consistency, uniformity. We’re hardwired to seek it. High notes excite us, but chest voice grounds them.

Once you depart from the true tonal quality of your natural chest voice — you lose quality, tonal connection, and the connection with your audience. The high notes mean nothing without that foundation.

2. It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice… Technically

Sonically, chest voice sets the tone. But technically — how do we maintain that tone as we move higher?

In chest voice, the vocal cords are thicker and shorter — controlled mainly by the thyroarytenoid (TA) muscle. The sound we hear is, to a large extent, shaped by this contraction.

If a singer could maintain the same balance of co-ordination from chest voice as they ascend, the audience wouldn’t detect any shift. That continuity comes from preserving the same muscular function — primarily the TA muscle’s engagement — even as other mechanisms adjust to help navigate pitch.

Of course, taking full chest voice up is difficult — it can lead to strain if overdone. That’s where concepts like contraction and release come in. The goal isn’t to drag chest up but to preserve its integrity in coordination — even as resonance and effort adjust.

When you hear a singer hit powerful high notes that still sound effortless and consistent — you’re hearing a well-managed chest-dominant function, carried upward with finesse.

Everything good you hear in a voice can be traced back to this technical balance.

3. It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice… Psychologically

This one’s less talked about. We focus so much on how things sound or work mechanically — but the psychological side matters just as much.

Put simply: if something feels weird, fragile or disconnected to you while singing, you won’t want to do it. You’ll avoid it, subtly or overtly — even if it technically “works.”

The goal is to train your voice so that when you sing high, it still feels like your voice. Not a dramatic gear shift. Not a different identity. Just an extension of the same instrument you use to speak and emote every day.

That internal consistency — how it feels in your head and body — is what gives you confidence and makes technique sustainable.

Conclusion

When done right, your upper range becomes a natural part of your voice. It’s not a trick. It’s not something you “switch into.” It’s just your voice — top to bottom — connected and consistent.

But none of that is possible without first anchoring it all in chest voice. If your chest voice isn’t solid, nothing else can really fall into place.

If you’d like to experience this shift for yourself, book a session using the button below. I’d love to help you build a voice that works — not just in sound, but in feel, function, and freedom.

So, let’s talk about Formants in Singing…

While I’ve taken a break from coaching and working on my own voice in general over the Christmas holiday (boy was that a good rest!), I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading on formants in singing. If any of you have any interest in voice science, I can thoroughly recommend Kenneth W. Bozeman’s ‘Practical Vocal Acoustics’. This is a helpful book covering the science of the voice from the perspective of the TEACHER and the singer, rather than purely from a voice scientist’s perspective. It’s this book that I’ll be drawing on for today’s explanation.

One of the things that keeps cropping up in my ol’ noggin is how critical the first bridge is… why? Because it’s crossing this portion of the voice that enables access to the rest of the voice… therefore, pretty important!

For many of us, we may accept that there IS this magical mysterious thing called a “bridge” or “passagi”, or as Kenneth W. Bozeman puts it, “where the voice turns over”… but…

What exactly is the first bridge?

Let’s discuss this. To do that we need to do a very quick (and very coarse) anatomy lesson.

The voice as an instrument consists of two parts:

1) the vocal cords; and

2) the vocal tract (the airway tube between your vocal cords and your lips)

The vocal cords

The vocal cords generate sound (acting as a source of sound), the vocal tract shapes the sound (filter). From here on in, please do me a favour – think of the vocal tract like a plastic water bottle, the squishable kind you can buy from any corner store.

The vocal tract

Have you ever blown across the top of a bottle that isn’t completely full? Have you ever noticed that the bottle has a particular pitch that it seems to generate? This is called resonance. Empty volumes (like plastic bottles) have distinct frequencies that they vibrate at when excited (e.g. by blowing across the top of it). You can spot the same effect by banging the side of a long cardboard poster tube and notice the pitch of the noise it emits, or even by humming down the length of that tube. These pitches are referred to as “formants”, and are a by-product of the fact that empty volumes exhibit resonance at particular frequencies.

NOTE: You don’t need to remember all this per se, I merely mention it so you respect the idea that empty volumes have an associated pitch they like to vibrate it, and that these pitches are called formants.

Now, let’s continue the analogy. If you change the shape of the empty volume inside the bottle (e.g. by squeezing it or adding some water in/taking some water out), then blowing across it, the associated pitches it wants to vibrate it (the formants) will have changed. The same effect can be achieved by cutting that long cardboard poster tube to a different length, then banging it again. The change in shape affects the resonance, which in turn affects the formants.

HALFWAY SUMMARY:
– The vocal cords generate specific frequencies (the singer’s pitch)
– The vocal tract resonates at specific frequencies (the formant(s) of the instrument)

In short, despite the chief difference where the cords generate the frequencies whilst the tract doesn’t actually generate those frequencies, both the vocal cords and the vocal tract possess their own particular sets of frequencies that are associated with them.

It’s the interaction between these two sets of specific frequencies that is an important phenomenon for singing.

Here’s the low-down…

The first bridge occurs when a certain frequency generated by the vocal cords happens to pass through a certain corresponding frequency of the vocal tract (a specific formant)*.

As you can see, this makes the whole concept of the first bridge *relatively* straight-forward to understand, but also results in the realisation that it’s a REEEEEEALLY complicated thing to get sorted in singers. If the first bridge happens as two frequencies cross each other, then what happens if they both start changing together? What happens if one suddenly changes during the process?

It’s a complicated system… it’s dependent on the pitch/frequency of the voice, the pitch that the vocal tract wants to vibrate it, which in turn is dependent on the shape of the vocal tract, but is also affected by the volume of the singer (as this affects excitation of the vocal tract).

*Deep breath*

Don’t panic.

This is all completely trainable, and completely manageable… but it takes more than just good exercises. It requires (in my opinion) a structured and logical approach to applying those exercises, so that singers are not constantly hyper-aware of bridges and essentially trying to control a million things at once all whilst trying to sing with emotion, but instead builds the required co-ordination into muscle memory, to thereby make easy connected singing automatic.

So… now you know where the first bridge comes from… What’s stopping you?

* – Specifically, when the second harmonic (H2) generated by the vocal cords passes through the first formant (F1) of the vocal tract. You DON’T need to remember this to be a great singer.

Tag: passagio

It All Starts And Ends With Chest Voice