When the high note wasn’t the problem
Singers often arrive in a coaching session saying: “I can’t sing that high note.”
Fair enough. That is what it feels like.
But sometimes the high note itself is perfectly available. The problem is what you are doing on the way there, or even the word you are trying to sing when you arrive.
I was working recently with a singer on a phrase that kept feeling unreliable. The obvious conclusion would have been that the note was too high, or that she was struggling to maintain M1 as she went up.
So we tested it.
The coordination itself was there. She could make the note.
The difficulty was much more specific. The word contained a diphthong – two vowel sounds moving into each other – and the timing of that movement was making the note harder than it needed to be.
So we temporarily removed part of the diphthong.
Suddenly the high note worked.
That is such an important moment in a lesson because it changes the story the singer is telling themselves. “I can’t sing that high” becomes: “I can sing that high note, but this particular vowel sequence needs organising.”
Those are very different problems.
One feels global and threatening. The other is a practical job.
Once the singer knows the high note is available, we can decide where the vowel movement belongs, how much of the diphthong we want, and whether the result still sounds natural in the style.
This is why I am wary of jumping too quickly to conclusions about range.
A note can feel impossible because of the vowel, the consonant, the resonating shape, the volume, the register strategy, what happened in the phrase before it, or what the singer expects the note to feel like.
The useful question is not always:
“Can you sing that note?”
It may be:
“What exactly is making this note difficult?”
That question gives us somewhere to work.
And quite often, once we find the actual problem, the “high note problem” disappears.
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