Super Easy Chest Voice Exercises for Beginners
February 24, 2023
Abram Poliakoff
Chest Voice Exercises for Beginners
The first step is always to simply find your chest voice function. Thankfully, that’s pretty easy for most singers, since your chest voice IS your speaking voice. For that reason, most of the exercises within this lesson are mostly “speaking on pitch” with minimal sustain. You don’t need to worry about it sounding pretty at first. Your goal is just to use your speaking voice on specific pitches. In the last exercise we are going to try and keep that vibe while we do a more sung legato line in chest voice.
Exercise 1
First up, we’re speaking the word “hey there”. I’ll play your pitch for the top note on the word “hey”. Let your pitch drop for the word “there”, just like you would if you were greeting someone. I’m not concerned about the pitch of the word “there” - just speak it!
Please feel free to drop out if the pitch becomes too high to be “spoken” or “called out”.
Exercise 2
This next singing exercise may seem a little ridiculous, but it’s also very helpful for the singer who is trying too hard to “sing pretty” and is having trouble engaging their chest voice more naturally.
Although it's not quite speaking, it has a simple nonchalant feeling to it as well as if you are being somewhat condescending to someone and saying yeah yeah, blah, blah, blah. Alright let's take it up!
Exercise 3
For this last exercise try to use the ZZ sound to jump start your support and get a nice full sound at the top. Remember to keep it simple and somewhat speech-like even though this is the most “sung” exercise so far.
Chest voice on its own is somewhat limiting, but such a necessary component to our voice, especially for the story telling, narrative based singing. It helps us find our power and stability, but the reality is our chest voice ultimately lacks the flexibility, depth and dynamic variation that singing with head voice provides us with. If you feel confident with this, then check out our videos about head voice or falsetto.
