The CoMMUNITY SINGer

Hello, and welcome back to The Community Singer. This is episode eight, your daily warm up. Today, we're gonna give you a comprehensive daily warm up for you to use as and when you need to to try and really improve your vocal technique and your stamina using some very simple exercises.

We'll also make this available as an audio so you can listen to it wherever you are and do your daily warm up as you need to. We're going to begin with some breaths.

So putting your hands on your tummy, let's just take in a normal breath and release on that ‘sh’ sound. Take a breath.

Remember to splat the tummy and start again.

One more time each time a bit longer.

Lovely. Repeat after me.

Let's go around this again.

Remember to splat.

Very good.

Now we're going to move on to some simple sirens. This is how we always warm up the voice, and you can think of it like a really easy lunge as you would do you're about to go for a run. So we're gonna start on an ‘ng’ sound. So say after me sing.

Sing. Now take off the s.

Ing. And now take off the I.

That is the first siren sound that you're gonna use. So, I want you to just go from the lowest part of your voice to the highest part of your voice, but very gently, and we're going to slide up and down over all of those notes. I'll give you a demonstration. It goes like this.

Ross, will you give us a demonstration?

Let's all do one together. Here we go.

And each time you can try and go a little bit lower, a little bit higher. Here we go.

And especially if you can try and go into your head voice into that higher part of your register. If you're a male voice, then going into your falsetto also known as your head voice. So let's try that again and really allow yourself to change over the break into the different parts of the voice. Here we go. ‘ng’.

One more time.

Fantastic. We're gonna do the same thing using that v sound that we've been practicing with our fricative sounds.

Here we go.

And again, As low and as high as you possibly can. Fantastic. Now we're gonna move on to our first exercise with the piano. This is a lip trill. So we're going to make the sound, ‘brrr’

If you can do that, that's fantastic. Or you may be able to do either of those work brilliantly. If you need help with this, you can put your fingers in your cheeks, really put your fingers firmly up into your cheeks because it helps keep the space.

Give it a go.

Okay.

Lovely. Let's give it a go.

We're gonna start on a b flat.

Fantastic. You can always go back and do that again if you'd like more of a warm up.

Okay. We're on to our next exercise. This one is using the sound ‘v’ and you're really going to think about using your tummy to have all of those sounds accented with lots of movement.

Ross, will you play us how this one goes?

Excellent, and remember you can do as much or as little of that as you need to depending on your range.

And that exercise was based on the Blues Pentatonic Scale, which we talked about in episode six.

Now we're going to do some work on the sounds.

So these are E, A, I, O, U

We're gonna put them all together.

Try that with me.

We're gonna start off with a hum, so that we can really go through all of those vowel sounds as smoothly and as easily as possible with as minimal effort in the mouth as you can.

Remember, if you have a genetically male voice, start here.

Excellent.

Let's get the consonants working now as well. This one is to Me, Ma, Mi, Mu so we're using the vowel sounds again, but putting an ‘m’ before them. It goes like this.

Lots of mouth movement.

And remember if you're a male voice, you need to start at the lower part of your voice. And you may have noticed the changes between the different parts of the voice as you went through your break for your transition.

It's good to notice this and if possible try to bring the higher part of the voice down so you start in the head voice at a lower point rather than pushing the chest voice up.

Good work. And finally, now with more warmed up, we're going to end on one of our favourite exercises.

This one is really great for getting your vocal folds coming together and have a really good old sing. We're gonna start a little bit higher up in the voice, and you're gonna use yes, for this one. Ross and I are gonna demonstrate how it works first.

It's a call and response. Here we go.

‘Yay - ee, yay-ee, yay-ee yo’

Great. Let's put that all together now and try it as one whole exercise. You sing along with me.

Again.

Really well done. That's the end of the warm up.

See you next time.