Dear Caio and List:
Thank you Caio for responding to my earlier message and
registration. I expect Lloyd will weigh in later, but let me give
my comments in general and then for your voice.
I will clarify further, but I was trying to argue that what Lloyd says
is the tenor head voice perhaps resembles the female upper middle
voice, and that what is sometimes called male "falsetto" (but when the
tone is not breathy and has the ability to crescendo etc.) resembles
the female upper voice. I based this argument on two things: 1) my
own sense of how my voice works, and 2) Kenneth Phillips writings (see
Teaching Kids to Sing). I think "mike" on this list might concur.
The three charts you showed (Dave Stroud, Lloyd, and mine) are
essentially in agreement up to a point. First of all, certain
differences are based on different voices under consideration: Dave
Stroud's use of E4 as a mixing point is probably for a baritone.
What Dave Stroud is saying, I believe, is that about every fourth or
fifth in the voice there appears to be some kind of adjustment. It may
be that the "adjustment" is not a change of what Lloyd calls a
"phonational register" - perhaps the phonational register remains the
same but there is a change in resonance tuning. I agree with
Stroud's idea of some sort of adjustment about every fourth or fifth,
as does Richard Miller. For example, Richard Miller shows that for a
typical lyric tenor voice, there are the following areas:
Below C3 "Strohbass"
C3 - G3 Chest
G3 - C4 Lower Middle
C4 - G4 Upper Middle
G4 - C5 Upper
C5 + "Falsetto"
Again, the departure for Dave Stroud is that he uses a baritone voice,
and then terms the "Falsetto" extension as "super head". The
departure I made was to just relabel the names.
Now about your voice. I haven't heard it, but let us suppose that you
are a voice about a hole step higher than a lyric tenor. That would
mean to take the above charts up a whole step for you.
About questions of your voice - it's really hard to say since we can't
hear you. We had a list member a while back with this high natural
tenor kind of voice (transition to upper voice at A4), and he
eventually decided his voice worked best as a counter-tenor. Too bad
he is no longer participating on the list. He felt he had different
options for registration, but felt that a counter-tenor registration
worked best for him. As Tako and others have pointed out, a tenor's
"head voice" in certain respects feels and is an extension of the
lower and middle voices, without a sense of switching. In contrast,
the lighter head voice that a high light tenor or counter-tenor might
use perhaps involves a sense of switching, and maybe you are
discovering and exploring this "lighter head voice."
As far as what you wrote, it makes sense - it could be that you have
previously "pushed" your chest voice up to A4. Discussing it with
your teacher seems like the best approach.
Cheers,
Michael Gordon
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