Belting - the singer's big guns - it's all in the aim.

Belting is the sound in our singers’ toolkit that we use to express intensity of emotion. When we want to sing the pain of heartbreak, the rage of treachery, or the joy of loving so much it hurts, belting can convey it, and viscerally affect the audience. It’s loud, exciting, transcendent, and expansive. Found at the climax in a song, belting takes the audience to ever higher and thrilling heights. As such Schwartz’s “Defying Gravity” embodies a vocal expression of its own theme.

Belting features in pop, soul, jazz, funk, and all types of rock and post-rock genres. Because It’s physiologically and ascetically akin to shouting, so should be used sparingly unless you want the audience to feel they are being blasted relentlessly with a power hose.

But if reserved for the big builds, it can be thrilling for the audience, and for the singer it can be can be extremely therapeutic, giving us as it does the opportunity to yell our heads off without anyone calling the police!

As an extreme sport, proper guidance and training is essential if you’re not going to do vocal damage. A good grounding in vocal technique, including for example a good breathing technique and a freedom and ease of transition between the head and chest registers, is a pre-requisite for beginners studying belt.

Despite their frequent love of the belting sound, children are not yet fully developed to be able to belt themselves. This can be very frustrating for them, especially as they approach the need to express teenage rage. Age 14 is around the time I’ll consider whether they are ready to belt. To encourage my young students who are champing at the bit, I assure them they are building a great healthy vocal technique that will stand him in good stead for later being able to perform the vocal pyrotechnics they hear in their heroes’ work; singers they so want to emulate like Olivia Rodrigues, Ariana Grande and Billy Joe Armstrong.

The first step is to find the resonance: the place in the body where the sound is directed. Do we send our sound to resonate in the chest, for example, the top or back of our heads, the forehead or in the mask?

To prepare for belting, we want to send our sound to the nasopharynx. The nasopharynx is a chamber above the soft palate, level with the back of the nose. Don’t be fooled. The nasopharynx doesn’t mean the nose, and sending the sound into our nose would make for unpleasant listening. Not only that but if you get into the habit of sending the sound into your nose it’ll be difficult to break that habit so have a look at the diagram below and see if you can find where the nasopharynx feels like it is situated. It’s way back from the nose.

Have you ever wondered how tiny babies get to be so loud? It is the resonant potential of the nasopharynx. They naturally send out their sound via the nasopharynx to make the loudest, edgiest, least tolerable sound they can in order to get their needs met as quickly as possible! They also have a great connection with their breathing muscles. Watch a baby lying on her back and you’ll observe her tummy pumping up and down producing great, pure belting yells perfectly connected to the breath. So, following baby’s example, aiming our resonance through the nasopharynx is our starting point for a good belt. Okay it doesn’t have to sound so ear grating. We can hone and adjust the tone later. But until the sound is directed accurately, it’s going to be hard work, or worse, painful. On the other hand, once the place of resonance is found, belting has a freedom and ease that often comes as a surprise to the singer trying it for the first time. There's a lot more to say about belting technique than just this, but the precision of resonance placement is often overlooked. Once mastered, belting really is a kind of exhilaration for the singer and I highly recommend it!