Transcript
Hi. I’m Anya Singleton. We’re going to talk about how to sing mezzo-soprano. I am, myself, a mezzo-soprano. Basically what that means, is it deals with 2 things: Range, and it also deals with the quality of the voice. Where does the voice sit within your body?
When you’re talking about mezzo-soprano, the important thing to know is that mezzo-soprano is a middle voice; that’s literally what it means. You have some of the bottom notes, and you can go fairly high but you’re not up here, like you would be if you were a coloratura soprano, and you don’t live all the way at the bottom. You have the difficult task of being able to sing in the middle of the voice. People that are great belters tend to be mezzo-sopranos.
There’s 2 ways to approach it. If you talk about operatic mezzo-sopranos, you use a lot of what we call a mix, where you bring the falsetto down to the chest and it mixes to create a very clean tone. Then there’s belting mezzo-sopranos, rRock mezzo-soprano; that’s what I am. Usually, the range is somewhere within a low A to about a G, up here; a 2-octave range or so. Of course, there’s range below and above, depending on who you are as a person. That would be how to sing mezzo-soprano.
Most of your favorite pop belters are mezzo-sopranos. Things tend to be written up here, C to E. If you’re going to be approaching a mezzo-soprano song, you want to think about, what’s the best way to marry the low end with the high end so that you can make a tone that sounds strong and supported without blowing out the voice? I think that is the first way to think about singing mezzo-soprano.
That said, that very much is an inborn thing. You can train yourself how to hit different notes, but what makes you a tenor, a bass, a mezzo-soprano, a soprano, or an alto; a lot of that is that’s the voice you have. Work within those confines. You’ll know because you’ll know, “Okay. Gosh. I’m singing along with a song on the radio, and this part’s really too low for me. This may not be my range.” That’s a great way to practice it, as well.
