Do Your Warm-Ups!
As a vocal coach for the past 25 years, I know that warming up on vocal exercises is essential to singing your best. So, do my students. I spend a lot of time in the studio talking about how vocal cords are muscles, and how, just like any other muscle, they need to be stretched and actually physically heated up before they can do their best work.
However, since doing vocal exercises can be a little boring for some students, I often get asked if they are really necessary. “Isn’t it fine to just jump right into practicing my song?”
While you technically could start singing on them when they are physically cold, your vocal cords won’t really be able to give you their best function…and you risk causing a muscle cramp. By asking them to do a move before they are stretched and ready, your vocal cords could contract tightly (like a charley horse) and then be less effective for the rest of your performance time or practice session.
In addition to giving your vocal cords a good stretch and getting them ready for action, well designed warm-up exercises also function as training exercises that each target a different physical aspect of singing. By carefully choosing melodic patterns and consonant/vowel combinations, each vocal exercise can be designed to help strengthen and improve a particular muscle function of vocal technique.
So, what does a good vocal warm-up look and sound like? Start some purely physical moves: a couple of deep breaths to release your diaphragm muscle and get your abs ready to work. Stretch your jaw wide open, lift your eyebrows high, and extend your tongue out for a stretch.
Now it’s time to start the vocal part of vocal exercising! You can find some great exercises, divided by Vocal Style, here on this page of our Sing Anything — Mastering Vocal Styles book website: https://www.singanything.com/notation
Officially, singers should warm up for 20 minutes before practicing a song or having a performance. In all honesty, even I don’t have the patience to do that, so a solid 10 minutes with the above process should be enough. (Lower voices like basses and altos often need a little more warm-up time, though.)
A couple of situational notes: Firstly, If you are prepping for an audition, you’ll want to have a little bit more warm-up time. So, after you do your physical and vocal warm-ups, sing through your audition pieces once or twice ONLY (as you don’t want to blow yourself out). Bring water to the audition, and do some humming on “nnn” if you are stuck waiting in the lobby. Breathing in the steam from hot tea can help keep your cords stay warmed up, as well.
Secondly, instead, it’s a live performance that you are warming up for, then I recommend extending the warm-up by starting your set with an easy song. It’ll be almost like an additional warm-up — an onstage way to start gently on your cords so that you get the most out of them for the performance.
Besides the benefit of immediately sounding better at an audition or performance, another benefit to doing warm-ups consistently is that it creates a ritual for you as a performer — a mental preparation for doing your best every time you step on stage. If you always start a singing day (whether practicing or performing) with the same routine of physical and vocal warm-ups, you create a habit that that gets your mind and body ready to sing. Humans function really well with ritualized behaviors — particular in anxiety-provoking situations — so, believe it or not, a consistent warm-up routine can help alleviate stage fright. You’re using rituals to set you up in the right mindset every time!
So, yes, you may be impatient to get to practicing your song, but, I promise, your song practicing and performing will go MUCH better if you just DO YOUR EXERCISES!
