The human voice is naturally divided into at least two registers. Head voice and chest voice; this is the same for women as it is for men even though men’s ranges generally sit much lower than women’s. The chest voice or speaking voice as it’s sometimes called is the voice we’re most familiar with. As the name suggests it’s the voice we speak with every day.

If we compare for a moment the human body with the body of an acoustic guitar, the sound we hear when we strike and vibrate the strings is made much louder and more characterful because it resonates with the air inside the hollow body of the guitar. Similarly, when we speak the sound that is made by air vibrating our vocal chords resonates more fully in the air filled chambers of our lungs, throat, mouth and nasal cavities.

Hitting the high notes involves moving up the scale out of our chest voice and into head register where the sound resonates more fully from our sinus regions including behind the bony ridge of our nose and upper forehead. Because we’re creating the sound from a different part of our body, this head voice, often called falsetto for men does feel strange at first. It’s where we speak as little children and it can sound and feel very hollow, thin or breathy.

The more we sing in this voice, controlling our breathing from our diaphragm, the stronger this voice becomes.

You may already sing in this voice without knowing. It depends on your musical influences. The late Jeff Buckley has influenced a whole new generation of male vocalists to develop their head voice, in contemporary pop and rock genres. This is something that was far more prevalent for male lead vocalists in the 1970’s. Quite often it adds at least another full octave to a singer's voice in the top range. So hitting the high notes is not about straining your speaking voice out of key, it’s about discovering a new part of your voice that’s waiting to be developed.