Three most important warm up principles.
1. Good Posture
2. Proper Breathing
3. Be gentle with your voice and Warm-up before intensive use.
Try the following vocal exercises :
WARM-UPS
When you are going to sing, watch that you are in a position of minimum tension and maximum flexibility with your ears directly over your shoulders, shoulders over your hips. check that you can still see your shoulders out of peripheral vision.
1. GOOD POSTURE - pretend you are a puppet dangling on a single string attached to the top of your head
Be conscious of how you breathe. Deep breathing is essential for safe, healthy, effective voice production. When you breathe in, aim to feel as if you take in air as low down in your body as possible without your shoulders having to rise. Allow stomach muscles to relax outwards as you breathe in.
2. PROPER BREATHING - Begin your singing with exercices that focus on proper breathing. Panting like a dog or holding hands on the diaphram to feel it expanding outward while breathing in deeply are two such exercises.
After that it's time for a gentle vocal warm-up.
3. VOCAL WARM-UP - massage your face, lips, and throat to relax tension. hum an "m" sound gently up and down the voice range to to start the vocal warm-up.
Then, sing a series of round open vowels such as "Mmmeee-Mmmay-Mmmah-Mmmoe-Mmmoo" on one note and then repeating moving up and down the scale.
Check breathing - relax your gut muscles outwards as you take a breath in.
Other vocal health hints
- Be sure you keep your vocal folds moist and well lubricated. You can do this by drinking plenty of liquids throughout the day.
- Keep tea and coffee consumption to a minimum though, as the caffeine in these drinks dries out the vocal folds and can make the voice sound raspy and scratchy. Alcohol is also bad for the voice, as it dehydrates the body and therefore the vocal folds.
- Take time to take a relaxed, deep breath when you need to before you start to sing or speak.
- After speaking for a long time, warm-down by drinking some tepid water. Yawn and then breathe deeply.
- To nurse your voice through a cold or a throat infection, steam it - put some hot water in a basin, lean over it gently with a towel over your head and inhale the steam. Be careful not to scald yourself! For the best results, do this several times a day for approximately 10 minutes at a time.
- Look after your voice. Don't strain it. Eliminate background noise before you try to speak loudly over it. If you have to project your voice, always use breath support.
- Watch that you DO NOT push your voice from the throat. When you speak, your navel should move towards your backbone. If this doesn't happen, you won't get the best from your voice and you may even damage your voice without realising it.
ax2x3m said:
hi, just wanted to know if anyone cared to share how they warm up their voice to achieve their maximum capacity
just wanted to know if there was i better was since i usually dont do anything before a jamming session and it takes about 30 minutes to 1 hour before i can actually sing my best
the first 30 minutes is an agonizing struggle to sing song i usually sing but with a significant increase in difficulty since my voice isnt ready for it
any advice guys? i want to sing my best straight off the bat, any replies would be appreciated
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