Episode 349: How To Design Your Perfect Vocal Warm-Up
Do you ever wonder what is the most effective way to warm-up your voice? Ok, honestly, you've probably never thought about it beyond warming up your voice. You have a few "go to" vocal exercises, but they are kind of boring.
You aren't sure how to actually improve and then after you warm-up you don't really know how to practice either.
This is totally normal! But it can't be the norm if you want to become better singer.
In this episode, you will learn:
- The 3 things that you NEED to include in your vocal warm-up.
- The 2 things that you've probably never considered adding to your warm-up that are going to make a HUGE difference.
- An exact formula for your next vocal warm-up session.
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Full Transcript:
Do you ever wonder what is the most effective way to warm up? Okay, you probably don't even think about warming up, to be honest, right? I mean, you have a few go to exercises, but it's getting kind of boring, and you aren't sure how to actually improve. And then after your warm up, you aren't really sure what to practice either.
In this podcast, I'm going to give you three things that you need to be incorporating into your warm up today. It's going to make your warm up much more effective. effective, it's going to set your practice session up for success, and it's going to be a lot more fun. And two of these things you probably haven't even considered.
And then at the end, I'm going to give you an exact formula for your next warmup session, along with one of my favorite free resources. So let's get started. Welcome to the Star Singer Podcast. Taking singers from overthinking and overwhelmed to loving your voice. Yourself and the way that you sing. I'm Tiffany van Bokstel.
And in the last 17 years, I've taught one on one lessons to as many as 50 singers a week. That's thousands of voice lessons. And I'm so excited to share what works with you because singing is simple. You're just over complicating it. So let's get started.
All right. Let's talk about designing. the perfect vocal warmup for you. And this is for a practice session. So you're going to go into the practice room and before you do your thing, you know, that you should be warming up, but a lot of singers approach it wrong. And it's not your fault. It's like, what does.
I mean, this is a whole bigger idea, right? So we're deconstructing your practice right now because frankly, a lot of singers don't know how to practice and again, not your fault and you might need to also like get out of your head. That's a thing too, for sure. But when it comes to the practice session.
The first thing is warming up. And so a lot of attention is given to warming up the voice. And you might hear things like, Oh, you want to warm up your voice so you don't hurt yourself. Or you want to warm up your voice, you know, so you don't blow your voice out, which I guess is like the same thing. Um, but you want to warm up your voice so that you feel more comfortable as well.
But that's not the only reason to warm up your voice and your voice isn't the only thing that you should be warming up before your practice session. So today we're going to talk about the components to designing the perfect vocal warmup. And we're also going to kind of cater it to you. So, There are three things that you should be warming up, and I would almost argue that the other two are more important than the voice.
Which is what everybody focuses on. So the first thing that we should be warming up is our body. All right. Your body is your instrument. You've heard it. It's one of those cliches and singing that's actually true. Your body is literally your instrument. And I've always sung better after I get the blood flowing.
And so in college, you know, when I was practicing every day for like an hour or two, I, because that was like. part of my requirement for voice lessons, right, to graduate, I made sure that I scheduled a workout before my practice session because I always felt like I sang better and had much more control over my body.
Now, this doesn't have to look like, you know, I go to a CrossFit place and do this crazy workout. It could be taking a walk around the block. And I like things like this too, because it also helps to warm up your brain. So the three components that we're going to be talking about here to designing the perfect vocal warmup are going to be your body, your brain, and your voice.
in that order. So the first thing you want to do is think about how you can get your blood flowing. And then you might want to think about what tension is coming up in your body as you start to think about singing or start to sing. For example, a lot of common areas of tension among singers are going to be things like jaw, shoulder, tongue.
Alright, so if you know that your jaw is super tense, you can do something like a myofascial release. So what I'm doing right now, you can't see, is I'm just going to literally start massaging my jaw, and I'm gonna like get up in there, into like some of the cracky spots, and I'm gonna rub and pull, and, and you can be pretty rough with yourself, like you're pretty durable.
Cool? But you just kind of want to get in there, get all the way up behind your ears. Woo. I can hear some, some kind of cracking, feel some little crunchy spots. And that is something that you can do if you know that you have jaw tension. Because this is, this is designing it for you, okay? One of the things that I used to do in a warm up to get my body ready for singing is I used to have a really bad habit of reaching my neck forward.
I think This is because I'm kind of short and it was like a desire to communicate with the audience. But what was happening is I was reaching my, my neck so far forward that I was coming out of alignment with my instrument. And you can even tell like if I start talking like this and then I start talking like this, all I did was put my neck into that more reachy position.
So what my voice teacher in college had me do was to do these neck exercises. Where I would actually kind of put my chin down and back for about 20 reps. And the idea is to kind of stretch that out. So what we're doing here when we're designing this warmup for ourselves is we're taking some known form of tension and we're turning it into part of the warmup, part of getting your body and ready.
For singing. Right? Okay, so the second one that we're going to think about is the brain. The brain. And we have to get our brain on point. We need to stay focused. Because if we don't, you know that the only thing on your mind when you practice is, Do I sound good? And there is nothing that ends a practice session faster than the question, Do I sound good?
Because now you're listening for if you're sounding good. You're no longer paying attention to the feeling. You're no longer paying attention to the main goal. Your practice session ends short, and because it was frustrating and unsuccessful, the length of time between this practice session and next could be months, right?
We've all been there, so we need to get our brain right. What are your goals for today's session? And I want you to make them tangible, because sounding good is your opinion, and you are always going to be hard on yourself, even if you actually sound good. So that's a terrible form of measurement, right? So it could be, my goal is to learn the notes and rhythms to Amarillo by Morning.
I'm not sure why that's like the only, that's like the first song that popped into my head, but that's an example. Okay. The goal could be, all right, well, today I don't really have a performance goal. And so I want to practice loving my voice. So I'm going to go into Tiffany's 20 ways to love your voice.
And I'm going to do that prompt. And that prompt is the only thing that matters. Okay. If I'm successful with the talk to the hand experiment, I did a great job today. Maybe another goal is that you have a song set coming up. You're opening a show and you're doing a three song song cycle or song set. And your goal for the session today is to run through those songs and evaluate two things that you liked about what you did and two things that are going to take you to the next level.
So those are some ways that you can set goals for your practice session and get your brain right. They have to be tangible and you want them to be focused on things that you can actually check off the box. You can say, yes, without a doubt, I absolutely did that. All right. The last thing is the voice. Now we want to warm up the voice.
Because it's your instrument, but your body is also your instrument. We've already warmed up the body and now we want to warm up the voice. And the thing that a lot of singers struggle with is, well, how do I even do that? I, whoo, like I'm just gonna warm up. I'm just gonna do these things that I did in choir, but warm ups you can strategically choose.
What vocal exercises that you are going to do to warm up your voice because not only can you warm up your voice But you can also improve your voice at the same exact time Okay. Now I'm gonna give you my free foundations of singing higher course. It's honestly foundations for singing in general But these are, I'm trying to think of, I know it's two lessons.
You're going to get two full lessons. And I believe there's four full vocal exercises and all of these exercises are proven and I've worked with every level of singer. From beginner to advanced, you're going to get something out of this exercise. It's simple, but it's also focused. You know, that's what we talked about with the brain, because when you're focused on something like singing at a volume level eight or breathing on beat eight, You're not focused on do I sound good because your brain only has so many calories to burn During the practice session and you want it to be focused on something productive.
Not something unproductive like do I sound good, right? So I'm going to leave the link for my free foundations of singing higher course And that's gonna have some amazing warm ups that you can turn to To not only warm up your voice, to not only give your brain something to focus on, but something that will actually help you improve long term as a singer.
Again, the link is just gonna be in the description. So, let's design a sample practice sesh together, okay? So, body, 20 jumping jacks, and then I'm going to do my jaw massage, my myofascial jaw release. I'm going to write down my goals. All right, so my goals for today are to
sing through Amorili mia bella, Um, that's an Italian art song. Um, and see how much I know from memory. And then I'm going to practice Heart's Barracuda, and I'm going to focus on the emotions of the song because I've already mapped it out emotionally. And I want to make sure that when I'm singing, I'm thinking about and channeling those emotions.
So I have my goals down. And then I'm just going to go into the foundations of singing course, singing higher course, and I'm going to choose level two. Rhythm, meter, and timing of the breath because I really know that when I focus on rhythm that helps me a lot. So I'm going to do that and then I'm going to do my goals.
So I'm going to start with my body and then I'm going to go to my brain and then I'm going to go to my voice warm up and then I'm going to have I'm going to go through those goals that I wrote down. So that is an example of designing a warm up. And, you know, actually it's kind of more like designing a practice session.
It's It's the act of doing it in the warmup, right? And this is what's going to give you a successful practice session. So awesome. I cannot wait to see what you come up with. If you enjoyed this podcast, I would love and appreciate a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts. It's pretty simple. If you're subscribed to the podcast, you can just.
Click in your library the star singer podcast scroll down and leave a 5 star rating and review there I really appreciate it. It helps spread the podcast to more singers My DMS on instagram at Tiffany van box still are always open And so I'd love to have you share those vocal warm ups with me All right.
We have a new episode every Tuesday, so don't forget to subscribe. So they come right to wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. We'll see you next time.
