As a singer, incorporating vocal exercises into your warm-up is crucial for enhancing performance and maintaining vocal health. Once you become familiar with the exercises, you can easily integrate them into your current singing practice with minimal time and effort.
The best nine essential vocal warm-ups for singers
What is so difficult about warming up vocals? Why is it so essential for singers? Let’s take a closer look.
Vocal warm-ups offer these benefits:
- Reduces tightness and tension in vocal muscles
- Enhances the quality of your singing
- Decreases the chance of vocal strain or damage
- Promotes a gradual expansion of vocal range without causing harm
- Improves enunciation and clarity of lyrics
Whether you’re a rapper, soul singer, or the lead vocalist of a band, a good vocal warm-up is essential for preparing your voice for a solid performance. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the nine best vocal warm-ups to ensure your singing is prepared and ready for the spotlight.
1. Yawning Techniques
The yawning technique is a vocal warm-up activity that can significantly improve your vocal performance. The simple act of yawning relaxes your voice and removes stress from your face, thereby increasing your range.
This exercise also helps prevent vocal strain by loosening the muscles in your mouth, throat, tongue, and face. Yawning also increases the oxygen supply to your brain, keeping you more awake and engaged with your song.
To practice this exercise:
- Imitate a natural yawn by opening your jaw wide and slowly inhaling.
- Slowly exhale while closing your mouth, keep your lips together while keeping your teeth apart, and keep your chin and shoulders relaxed.
- After a few breaths, try humming or generating a pitch as you exhale. Experiment with different pitches by varying the duration and direction of the pitch with each exhale.
2. Humming Warm-Ups
Humming is a useful vocal warm-up exercise that elongates your vocal cords without straining them. It’s also a great technique to improve your voice resonance and tone quality, enhancing the overall quality of your singing performance.
To start this exercise, relax your face and body. Then, with your lips closed and jaw relaxed, make a “hmmm” sound by simply placing the tip of your tongue behind your front teeth. Next, hum notes across your range while keeping your mouth closed, gradually increasing the power of the hum.
The science behind the efficiency of the humming sound is created by the vibrations it produces. They relax your facial muscles and relieve stress that can affect your voice.
3. Tongue Trills
This exercise is similar to lip trills but focuses on the movement of the tongue. It involves rolling your tongue and trilling your “R’s” while shifting your vocal capacity from low to high.
To practice this exercise, start with your tongue relaxed and placing it behind the front of your upper teeth. Breathe in through your nose and then exhale through your mouth while rolling your tongue to produce an “R” sound or a cat-like purring sound.
As you strengthen your breath and warm up your singing, hold the sound and extend the duration as you improve.
4. Lip Buzzing
Lip buzzing, also known as lip trills, is an easy, fun, and effective exercise to increase diaphragm movement and improve breath control. This technique involves rapidly moving/trilling your lips to create a motorboat-like sound.
To put this exercise into practice, do the following:
- Make sure your face and lips are relaxed, as tight lips can’t trill.
- Push your lips together as if they’re going to pout, and then use your fingers to push your cheeks forward into the corners of your mouth.
- Breathe in through your nose and breathe out quickly through your mouth, making a “brrr” sound with your lips.
After mastering the basic technique, you can take your lip trilling to the next level by incorporating singing into your exercise. If you’re up for a challenge, you can try trilling short and long notes or even complete melodies.
5. Jaw-loosening techniques
Jaw-relaxing techniques can impact a singer’s performance due to a tight jaw. Yet, relaxing your jaw can successfully alleviate the stress in your mouth and jaw, resulting in a clearer enunciation of your lyrics while singing.
Begin incorporating jaw-loosening movements into your vocal warm-up by following these steps:
- Start by lowering your jaw to a comfortable level, lower than you normally would, and focus on the curved area between your jaw and ear.
- Massage this area in small circles with your fingertips to promote blood circulation and relax the muscles.
- Continue moving your fingers as you move your jaw up and down.
It may surprise you, but your jawline is one of the crucial muscles in vocal control. By incorporating jaw-loosening methods into your warm-up routine, you can increase the range of motion of your jaw, making singing more enjoyable and effortless.
6. Vocal Sirens Voice Exercise
The vocal siren is an excellent exercise for stretching your vocal cords without risking breaking your voice. It involves effortlessly switching between notes and ranges, mimicking the rising and falling pattern of a siren while using varied voice tones and “ooo” sounds.
To practice this exercise:
- Making the sound “ooh” is the first step.
- Start at the lowest note you can comfortably sing while maintaining the “ooh” sound, and gradually work your way up to the highest note.
- Then move to the softest note within your reasonable range, maintaining the “ooh” sound throughout.
- Repeat until your voice sounds like an emergency vehicle responding to an alarm call!
It is crucial not to strain your voice. Extending your vocal range beyond what is comfortable can lead to vocal strain and injury. Trust your body and mind and focus on progressively developing your record over time instead of forcing it.
7. Practice Your Breathing
Breath control is necessary for producing a controlled, powerful, and expressive vocal tone, which is needed for a victorious vocal performance. This can be trained by breathing in deeply and exhaling with a hissing sound.
Follow these steps to carry out this exercise:
- Stand up straight and relax your torso, shoulders, and chest to maintain proper posture.
- Breathe in slowly for about five seconds through your mouth, allowing your belly to expand outward while you control your breath so that your shoulders or chest do not rise.
- Begin generating a “sss” sound as you exhale, making sure your chest and shoulders remain relaxed.
You can improve your control and lung capacity by repeating this exercise multiple times. Another way to test yourself is by breathing out for a longer duration each time you repeat the exercise.
8. Making vowel sounds
Using your voice to produce vowel sounds is an effective way to improve vocal articulation and clarity. By strengthening your mouth shape and vocal tone control, you can automatically enhance the pitch, tone, breath control, and vowel shape of your singing.
When using your face to make vowel shapes, keep in mind your lip, jaw, and tongue positions, as in “Eh, Ah, Oh, Ee, Ooh.”
Furthermore, to perform this exercise, start by singing the five vowels at the same pitch. Ensure a consistent mouth shape to generate them in a natural and clear manner.
Then, gradually increase your pitch by a half step each time you go through the vowels. Duplicate the exercise and method by singing vowels downwards and upwards, paying special attention to the shape of your mouth and how each vowel closes and opens the throat muscles. This strategy can significantly help you improve your singing skills.
9. Tongue Twisters
Tongue twisters are an entertaining and interesting technique to improve your vocal articulation. They can be very useful in preventing prominent crises on stage by preparing your mouth and brain for transitions between different syllables.
Start by reciting a single phrase slowly, and gradually increase the tempo as you gain confidence. Repeat the same line multiple times, getting faster with each repetition. You can also try repeating the line at different pitches as you progress.
Reciting various tongue twisters can help to stretch your muscles and naturally relieve stress in your voice, as your teeth, lips, tongue, and jaw articulate. Moreover, incorporating tongue twisters into your vocal warm-up regime will drastically improve your singing performance.
When should you perform vocal warm-ups?
Warming up your voice is just as important as regular practice when learning to sing or play an instrument. Allocate 10-20 minutes daily to practice vocal skills and tricks to successfully prepare and train your voice. Consistency and repetition are key to making improvements.
Moreover, the optimal time to train these vocal warm-ups is shortly before singing, both on stage and in the studio. As you progress, you can gradually increase the intensity of the exercises.
It’s crucial to start gently and not push yourself beyond your limits, as this can cause damage to the vocal cords. You can challenge yourself while keeping your voice safe and healthy by maintaining your own pace and gradually increasing your skills.
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Final Thoughts
Warming up before singing is essential for maintaining a healthy voice and performing at your best.
Lip trills, humming, tongue twisters, and breathing control exercises are excellent vocal warm-up exercises. However, selecting the right vocal exercises is crucial for warming up the vocals before singing.
It’s important to remember that vocal warm-ups should be performed regularly to strengthen the vocal cords and maintain a healthy voice. Incorporate these vocal warm-ups into your singing regimen to maximize your singing enjoyment.