All Matters Music
People who work out in the gym or exercise frequently might be familiar with the term ‘WARM UP.’ Warming up means preparing our body muscles for the upcoming exertion it needs to undergo while doing heavy workouts. All sportspersons do a warm-up before engaging themselves in sports activities they are good at. It is because without warming up if we jump into doing any heavy straining over the muscle it will lead to injury. Usually, people do small stretching exercises and move about gently to warm up themselves.
The same way a singer needs to do a warm-up before singing. In the human body, the movement of vocal cords within the larynx produces sound. Vocal cords are elastic muscle tissue and they vibrate to make voice. So just like warming up our biceps or triceps before workouts, we need to do a simple warm-up exercises before putting vocal cord muscles to heavy singing. Doing warm-up will keep the vocal cords healthy and improve our singing ability. It can help us extend our voice range considerably. A very experienced singer to an aspiring young musician needs to thoroughly do a warm-up before putting any strain to their vocal cords.
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The question is – How to warm up your voice before singing?
Warming up your voice before singing begins by performing breathing exercises and then moving on to simple exercises to engage our vocal cords. Maintaining a good posture before warm-ups are essential and the best way will be to stand with a relaxed shoulder and neck and a firm abdominal muscles. While vocal warm-ups concentrate mostly on the vocal cords, our lips; tongue; lungs; and abdomen will inevitably need light exercises to build strength for good vocal coordination. It will take almost a minimum of 10 minutes to 20 minutes of warming up before singing.
Apart from all the above, maintaining a good healthy diet, which will be good for our voice, especially lots of vitamins and minerals can help us to sing better. Drinking a lot of water can give us a lot of hydration, which will give our voice a positive uplift.
In this article, we will be discussing mainly different warming up tricks but let us begin by some of the important yet ignored first steps that will help in the long run to become a good musician.
Getting Ready to Warm-up
Posture
Vocal cords are an integral part of good singing but an intelligent and experienced singer put good use of their whole body to give a perfect singing experience. For the same reason even before warming up, we need to find the perfect posture, to begin with. We need to keep our chin parallel to the ground. We are to hold our chest high and open so that we can increase the lung capacity to the maximum. Our shoulders need to be relaxed yet push a bit backward. The abdomen should be firm and we need to feel the vibration of our singing in the stomach. The best way to incorporate strength to our singing is by standing firm with straight legs that are solidly rooted to the ground.
Breathing exercises
Doing simple breathing exercises before warming up will increase lung capacity. Singing demands for good lung capacity. To begin with, we can fill our lungs fully, inhaling through the nose and filling our stomach with the air but without moving shoulders and chest. We can inhale and exhale for many times to stretch the diaphragm. Apart from these breathing exercises, aerobic exercise can be a very good means to improve lung capacity, for example, walking; swimming; running regularly can help us.
Different Techniques to Warm Up
Humming
Everybody knows to hum his or her tunes. Humming can be the best vocal exercise, to begin with. It is not straining yet is a powerful way to open our voice ranges. One needs to start humming “hmmm” in lower notes then repeat it 5 to 10 times. Once you feel you are good to go, move to hum “ahhhh.” Repeat them for 5 to 10 times. This will help to relax the muscles of larynx, face, neck, and shoulder.
Solfeggio
Once you are done with the basic humming, you are ready to go ahead with humming solfeggio or in layman’s words, DO-RE-MI. You can do this by humming DO-RE-MI increasing the scale at each step and then going back down. Reap it 3 to 4 ascending keys and then find your way back down the keys. This concentrates on improving pitch changes.
Working those lips
Once you are ready with your voice. It is time to put your lips to work. Making some buzzing and bubbling sound will help your lip muscle to warm up. The lip trill or lip bubbles are made by closing the lips and allowing the air to go through them creating a ‘brrr’ sound. To give a good workout, singers can add different notes to the lip trill.
Vocal sirens
The vocal sirens can help you smoothen the breaks and can connect different areas of voice. We can start practicing sirens with a simple ‘oh’ syllable at the lowest note and then slide the way up to the highest note of your comfort. Then repeat it in descending order too. One needs to be relaxed and not put any overt strain to achieve the notes.
Singing twisters
Experts say, tongue twister is a good form of vocal warmup tool. We can use them to give our tongue, jaw, and lips a good warm-up. Singing those twisters in different pitches and voice ranges.
Conclusion
After doing the above warm-ups, one can confidently move on to singing any hard songs or practice their daily lessons. When we realize warm-ups as the spine of good singing, our approach towards music itself changes. Our ability to sing will improve daily if we keep warming up vocal cords as an integral part of our practicing music and it will, in turn, help us to be a better singer.
