What?! Aren’t they the same? NOPE.
Falsetto is breathy and weak compared to head voice. It can still be a great stylistic choice though. It can be beautiful and haunting like in The Weekend’s Rolling Stone at 1:30 for example, or Billie Eilish’s Everything I Wanted, also at 1:30.
Head voice is stronger than falsetto. An example of head voice is Maroon 5’s She Will Be Loved in the chorus at 1:18 where he goes up to a B5 on “be”, or the very first line of Arianna Grande’s no tears left to cry. You can hear these examples have a little more strength and aren’t breathy.
Here is the thing. The muscle coordination between falsetto and head voice is different.
In a balanced chest voice, there is still a little bit of that CT (head voice) muscle activation, especially as we go up in pitch.
Same with a balanced head voice, there is still a little bit of TA (chest voice) muscle activity, more or less depending on how intense of a sound we are getting.
When we are in falsetto, the TA (chest voice) muscle essentially let’s go, and we have no thickening or shortening of the vocal folds happening, so we get a thinner and more breathy sound.
As you sing through your range, at any point, there will be a whole range of choices in terms of how much TA or CT you are activating. This is all a version of mix, which we will talk more about in the next blog.
Let me know if you have any questions! Or, drop in some other examples of head voice and falsetto that you like!