Voice cracking happens when the singing muscles stop working properly just long enough for the sound to stop. Maintaining a steady flow of air, especially on high notes, helps prevent the voice crack. Sometimes singers crack when they’re suffering from severe allergy problems or other ailments that make their voices feel different.
Young singers may crack as they figure out how to sing higher notes. Young men may experience some cracking during puberty and afterward as they discover how to sing higher notes without too much pressure in the throat.
Giving yourself permission to experience the crack enables your body to release some of the tension associated with the fear. Give yourself permission to not be perfect. It’s impossible to be perfect. If you average the one note that isn’t so perfect with the other hundred notes in the song, you have pretty slim odds for cracking.
And if you do crack on a high note, it isn’t the end of the world. Singers can crack, and members of the audience didn’t boo, because they understood that it was just part of the growing experience for that singer.
The fear of cracking may disappear after you sing the same phrase several times without any problem. Make a list of all the things you have to do when you sing and keep practicing them until you can do them all at the same time. You may have to practice doing two skills at once before you try to do four.
Practicing these skills helps prevent cracking: keeping a steady flow of air moving as you sing, opening your throat, and knowing your capabilities by understanding what your voice can do in each area, such as your head voice. Enabling yourself to do several things at one time takes courage and determination.
Most people are capable of multitasking, and so are you. You can drive your car, change the station on the radio, and have a conversation with the person in the passenger’s seat all at the same time. You can certainly apply this same process to singing.
You may find that acting helps you sing the high note without cracking. You may get so caught up with your story in the heat of the moment that you go to sing the high note and the breath just moves for you. How cool is that?