Dear Alain, Sharon, and Deanna and Vocalisters:
Good to hear from you again Again.
Although the use of falsetto to remove vocal tension (as the male student learns to use the high voice) can be a helpful teaching technique, it still is not a vocal function that, in my opinion, significantly resembles the vocal function found in head voice. In this sense its use is a kind of alternate therapy that, though different than head voice, does give the student some degree of confidence and security in the head voice frequency range.
However, even after the student has acquired the skill of falsetto singing and been able to extend this falsetto voice into the upper regions of the chest voice (as low as A immediately below middle C) there is still the problem of having to switch from falsetto into either chest voice or head voice (depending on the pitch at which the switch is attempted). At the moment of that switch most students experience a disheartening failure and many voices will actually "crack" as they make this transition. Such failures or inductive "cracks" are not of much help to the student because they do not teach the voice how to make the gradual transition from Thyroarytenoid muscle emphasis to Cricothyroid muscle emphasis. Instead the student experiences a sudden and dramatic change from the open glottis with little medial tension to a suddenly closed glottis with an excessive degree of medial tension which is not the desired vocal conformation for either chest or head voice and is also not a healthy manner of obtaining that desired conformation.
This is not to say that falsetto usage cannot be helpful as a teaching tool but only that its use introduces a crutch that can become habitual and difficult to change and, in some cases, can encourage abusive vocal behavior such as "cracking". I do not recommend its use to less experienced voice teachers and, although I have used it, I have found it needs to be carefully monitored to prevent its abuse by the student.
I much prefer some of Mike's suggestions of everyday or, as I refer to them, primitive sounds that tend to achieve the conformation of the vocal mechanism that is present in head voice such as "puppy whines," "baby whimpering," etc. Many such devices are available but not all students can use all of them. I have found that young basses and baritones, sometimes up to the age of 23 or so, are incapable of whining or whimpering because their vocal mechanism is not yet developed enough to produce these tones and, in these cases, I will use falsetto as a carefully controlled, temporary stop-gap. (The above assumes, of course, that the male student has enough confidence in himself that he is willing to attempt this "decidedly un-male activity!"). I have found no such difficulty with the tenor voice.
For what it is worth.
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