What is Belting and How to Belt Your Singing Voice

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What is Belting?: 0:00
Octave Repeat Nay for Males: 5:02
Octave Repeat Nay for Females 5:20
Octave Repeat Nae for Males: 6:17
Octave Repeat Nae for Females: 6:48
Octave Repeat Bae for Males: 7:43
Octave Repeat Bae for Females: 8:01
Octave Repeat Gug for Males: 8:59
Octave Repeat Gug for Females 9:16
Octave Repeat Mum for Males: 10:35
Octave Repeat Mum for Females 10:54

Who are we kidding? Belting is one of the coolest vocal sounds you can hear!

It doesn't matter whether you're just starting to learn to sing or have been singing for 20 years, everyone wants to learn how to belt their singing voice.

But what is belting actually, and how can you learn to belt your singing voice safely?

Belting means singing the highest notes in your voice with tons of vocal power.

To put it another way, you can think of belting your head voice notes with the power of your chest voice.

Chest voice? Head voice? Confused yet?

It's really straightforward. Here's what you need to know:
In order to sing low notes, your vocal cords must be very thick.
Just like the strings of a guitar, these thick vocal cords vibrate very slowly.
And these slow vibrations create the sound and pitches of chest voice.

In order to sing high notes, your vocal cords must be very thin.
These thin vocal cords vibrate much faster creating a faster vibration and higher notes.
These faster vibrations create the head voice register.

But in belting, you're hitting high notes with a ton of vocal power.

This happens when you stretch out the vocal cords to hit a high note, but you keep some of the thickness of the chest voice.

The result is an amazingly exciting, big and powerful sound. Belting sounds just like singing chest voice even on your highest notes, and that's something everyone wants especially in rock music.

But I should warn you: it's very easy to belt your high notes wrong and hurt yourself.

That's because it's difficult to know how much tension and pressure you should use to hit those high notes.

Instead, I'll show you 5 exercises to help you learn to belt safely and still get the powerful sound that you're looking for.

In the first exercise, we'll simply sing an octave repeat arpeggio on a bratty "nay" sound.

The bratty "Nay" exercise is fantastic at giving you the powerful sound that you're looking for while preventing you from straining.

And even though the "Nay" is not the most powerful vowel to use when belting, it still gives you a great place to start.

The next exercise we'll look at also uses an octave repeat arpeggio. This time, we'll sing the word "Nae" as in "Nasty" in a bratty way.

As soon as you sing this exercise, you'll see that the "Ae" vowel gives you a much stronger sound on the top notes in your voice.

In the third exercise, we'll continue using the octave repeat arpeggio. In this case however, we'll use an ugly "Bae" (as in "Bat").

The reason for this change is that the "B" consonant provides more back pressure for the singer. So rather than increasing tongue tension with the "N" consonant, the "B" gives you plenty of sound to use.

In the fourth exercise, we'll start using more normal sounds to learn to belt. Rather than belting with the ugly or bratty sound, in the fourth exercise we'll use the "Gug" (as in "Gutter") sound.

The beauty of this exercise is that the "G" consonant gives you a lot of glottal closure and the "uh" vowel encourages a lot of chest voice.

Both of these factors are huge in giving you a big belty sound in the high notes in your voice.

In the final exercise, we'll use the octave repeat arpeggio scale on "Mum" (as in "Mother").

This is the most normal sounding exercise we've looked at so far to help you learn how to belt. That's because it also gives you the least support on your high notes.

So if the other exercises helped you learn to belt, you can work on the "Mum" exercise last to polish up your high notes.

Learning to belt is a really rewarding skill when singing. So take your time and make sure that you're belting the right way and watch your high notes become super powerful!