Do Your Warm-Ups!
Warming up is essential to singing your best. Your vocal cords are muscles, and, just like any other muscle, they need to be stretched and actually physically heated up before they can do their best work.
While you could start singing on them when they are physically cold, they really won’t 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 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 cords a good stretch and getting them ready for action, each warm-up exercise is also a training exercise that targets a different aspect of singing. By carefully choosing melodic patterns and consonant/vowel combinations, each vocal exercise is designed to help strengthen and improve a particular muscle function for vocal technique.
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So, what does a good vocal warm-up look and sound like? Start with a couple of deep breaths to release your diaphragm muscle and get your abs ready to work. Follow that by stretching your jaw wide open, lifting your eyebrows high, and extending your tongue out for a stretch. Now it’s time to start your vocalizing exercises. Here’s a good order (my students know these patterns):
1. Falsetto foo (to give a relaxed, non-contact stretch first)
2. Mee (for breath and abdominal control)
3. Nay (for resonance in your nasal cavity)
4. Yeah (for soft palate and jaw)
5. ABCs (for articulator muscles).
Officially, singers should warm up for 20 minutes before practicing a song or having a performance. 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.)
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If it’s a live performance that you are warming up for, then I recommend 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.
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.
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Another benefit to doing warm-ups consistently is that it creates a ritual — a mental preparation for doing your best in performance. 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 ritual 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 WARM-UPS!
