All Matters Music
Singing is a talent developed through patience and relentless training. There is a misconception that one has to be a born singer to become a successful musician but like every other profession, a person should have a love towards the profession and open-mindedness to learn and develop the skills relentlessly. Let us take a simple example of dancing. A person is not born a ballet dancer or a classical dancer but he or she molds their love for dancing through vigorous training to become a successful dancer. Same way, a musician playing an instrument should train to play the instrument to produce good music from it. So a singer should be conditioning his or her vocal cords (as an instrument) to sing good music. Vocal exercises are the tools used to train our vocal cords.
Benefits of Vocal Exercises
Vocal cords or vocal folds are made up of elastic muscles. We need to tame our cords to become a successful musician. At least 30 minutes of regular exercise is recommended to any aspiring singer. Apart from this below are some good reasons that will force you to do vocal exercises:
- Expanding vocal flexibility. Vocal exercises can help a person’s vocal range both upper and lower. It will improve our range of singing.
- Vocal health. Vocal health is an integral part of singing. A good diet and keeping yourself hydrated always is very important and what is equally important to that is vocal exercises. It helps us to maintain good vocal health.
- Improve weakness. Daily exercising does shed light on our shortcomings. Thus, we can work on them and correct ourselves. Practicing makes everything perfect is the mantra for that.
- Unleashing voice. Every person has a uniqueness to his or her singing and regular practicing will help us to isolate the distinct feature and create a signature to our singing. Every successful and famous musician is regarded for their unique singing style and sound. It is through daily practice that they have achieved it.
- Smooth transitioning. It helps us to flex our muscles and in turn, help us to transition through different registers. Mastering different registers is a bonus for every singe and vocal exercises can help us in smoothly transitioning between them.
- Boost your confidence. Vocal exercising can get rid of your fears and inhibitions, thus boost your confidence.
Preparing for Vocal Exercises
Drinking plenty of water throughout the day is the most important health tip anyone can give and it is true for singing too. Our vocal cords dry out easily during vocal exercises so it is a must to drink lots of liquids. It is better to avoid sodas or juices as these can irritate your cords.
Doing breathing exercises before vocal exercising is beneficial to improve our 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.
Avocal trainer gives his initial tips to improve our posture. Good posture impacts our singing a lot. It can optimize our singing.For best posture, we need to keep our chin parallel to the ground. We need to hold our chest high and open to increase lung capacity. Shoulders need to be relaxed yet held back. The tummy should be firm. People do sing sitting and standing but one thing you need to keep in mind is your spine should be straight.
After these initial steps, we can move on to doing some warm-ups. Every person going to a gym or doing regular body exercises will be familiar with the term warmups. As our vocal cords are made up of muscles, it is integral to warm up before putting it to an immense strain of exercising. We can begin with small humming and then move on to doing lip trills or bubbles.
Vocal Exercises for Singing
Below are some of the simple vocal exercises every person can do to improve their singing.
- Solfeggio –Solfeggio or in layman’s words, DO-RE-MI, is the best way to start exercises. 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.
- 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.
- Arpeggio – Arpeggio means notes of chords or in simple words MI-SOL-DO-SOL-MI-DO. We can sing arpeggio in different variations. Start with a major arpeggio on a lower pitch and then repeat a half note higher. These exercises are beginner level and one can master these and then move on to many difficult ones.
- Lip trills and bubbling – Though trills and bubbling are vocal warmups, we can use these for vocal exercising too. It can be sung in different notes and moving from lower notes to higher notes will help us refine our singing.
- Singing songs – We can incorporate some songs to do vocal exercises. It makes vocal exercising much easier and enjoyable. Some songs are,
• Can’t help falling in love – Elvis Presley.
• Unchained Melody – Righteous brothers.
• Hero – Mariah Carey.
• Perfect – Ed Sheeran.
• Hometown Glory – Adele.
The emotion behind singing is always related to fun and joy, at the same time a person should consider vocal exercising a real business. When we see every successful musician, we should see a hardworking singer who trains daily and continually.
