How to Belt without Ruining Your Voice | Vocal Lessons

Watch more How to Sing: Singing Lessons for Beginners videos: http://www.howcast.com/videos/476725-How-to-Avoid-Common-Singing-Mistakes-Vocal-LessonsLearn how to belt out a song without ruining your voice from vocal coach Cari Cole in this Howcast singing tutorial.Hi I'm Cari Cole. I'm a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I've worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I've worked with the band Journey. I'm going to teach you how to be a better singer and performerSo I'm going to show you how to belt without ruining your voice. The first thing to understand is that it doesn't require a lot of force to belt. So when we think of belting, we think of a lot of impact and a lot of force. Unfortunately that causes problems here. So with a singer you want to get a deeper breath because breath is what fuels the voice. So number one, breath. Number two, don't hit the sound so hard. Number three, keep the mouth more open. So these are three things you can do right away to start belting without straining the vocal instrument. You also want to practice vocal exercises so your voice gets stronger. Your voice gets stronger as you sing and as you practice. Vocal exercises are really a focused way that you can make changes in the physical voice and get stronger because ultimately the stronger your voice the more you can belt with ease. If I sing the word stay, I'm going to sing - STAY [sing]. OK. Now when I sang that I didn't go - STAY [sing]. I didn't like try to use a lot of physical muscle force. I actually used more of the breath and I thought about creating space inside my mouth. STAY [sing]. I'm thinking of the sound up here. So that's were you want to put the sound is really important because if you start singing from the throat muscles you can hurt yourself. So I really want you to imagine that . . . and I use this C shape a lot when I'm training singers. It helps to show what happens inside the mouth. So we really want this opening here. We want the tongue to drop and palate to lift and have all this space for the sound to circulate in. STAY [sing]. Instead of - STAY [sing]. Instead of using these throat muscles. So that's like the number one way to learn how to belt without straining your voice - is to create more space inside the mouth. Don't use as much impact on these muscles and get a deeper breath to support the sound.