Today we are talking about why healthy belting is so important. I have taught many of my students to belt, and I’m very proud to say that they are all doing it healthily. So I’m excited to share that with you today.

When most people teach themselves how to belt, it’s not the healthiest. I’ve known many people that have had to get vocal nodes surgery and there’s also a lot of famous people that have had to get it as well – Julie Andrews, Adele (twice). So just because you’re famous doesn’t mean that you’re belting healthily. Let me define to you what a vocal node is. A vocal node usually occurs when your vocal folds have been misused and have been hitting, hitting each other too hard for too long in the wrong way. A node is basically a callus on your vocal folds. It’s  really bad because we use our voice everyday whether we’re singers or not. Chances are, if you’re using your voice in an unhealthy way, you’re probably doing it over and over and over and over. 

If you get a vocal node – it looks like a bump on your vocal folds. It’s an issue because it doesn’t allow a full closure of your vocal fold. So that ends up sounding really raspy and really airy. It can also increase other vocal issues. Vocal health issues are very real and occur often from a variety of issues. This is why healthy singing and especially healthy belting is so important! 

 There are two ways belting can be accomplished…a healthy way and a not healthy way. The unhealthy way is to squeeze the sound out of your throat with the muscles in your neck. If you associate belting with pain, that is what you’re doing. When you belt healthily, you are supporting your sound and using chest dominant sound where you would most likely usually switch to head voice. When we’re trying to belt, we actually are maintaining more of that chest sound and higher and higher. When we do that, we have to maintain a little bit more control so that we don’t accidentally slip into head voice, but that control should not hurt. That control truly comes from the really good breath and maintaining the support by keeping our ribs open and expanded and streamlining our air flow so that we’re able to maintain that chest sound as we go up into head voice. 

I know a lot of you have been super interested in learning how to belt and I’m going to teach you guys, step-by-step technically speaking the ways that you can learn how to belt. You can access the Full Belting Course at https://singingwithlauren.mykajabi.com/offers/V6Cs3SjW