It is important to take the time to engage, prepare and ‘turn on’ our body before any exercise, your voice is no different. By properly warming up your voice prior to singing, you will see improved performance, experience an increase in your vocal stamina and energy. Plus, it helps to establish correct singing technique.
If you are not certain on what a proper vocal warm up looks like, we hope this blog post can help. We will outline some specific exercises, an appropriate duration and some techniques that will work best for your age and voice type.
After reading this article, you should be able to tailor a warm-up session suited to you!
Vocal Warm Up Duration
The appropriate duration for a vocal warm up is really dictated by your age.
Younger singers are more suited to a short time period for optimal performance. An interesting point is over-warming up can sometimes have negative impacts. For children aged under 10, about 5 minutes is totally acceptable. If you are between 10 and 16, extending that time slowly to 10 minutes will help, especially as both male and female voices change during this adolescent period. Once you turn 18, warm ups will begin to vary depending on the singer and the context, but generally will last around 15 minutes. Professional singers adhere to this time formula also. Keep in mind that over-singing in a warm-up and tiring your voice before a lesson or performance is something to avoid.
Age Appropriate Vocal Warm Up Exercises
Now that you know how long a warm up should be, we hope to provide some ideas for what to do. With so many ideas out there, it can be confusing about which is best. Here are some ideas about what to include for your relevant age and voice type.
Children Under 10
Keep exercises simple for children under 10 years. Items that are light and easy generally work best and ensure all warm ups are conducted within a comfortable range. Start with a few key technical exercises involving breathing, posture and expression. Going up and down five notes on a ‘ba’, ‘doo’ or ‘nya’ is simple yet effective. We usually use a keyboard to assist with scaling of notes.
The deliberate use of nonsensical syllables is not only entertaining for the child but is a subconscious exercise in creation of vowel shapes and evenness of tone.
Furthermore, changing from a minor to a major pattern can educate the child on mood, and hence phrasing. With younger children especially, asking them to imitate a gorilla or a mouse is a fun and engaging way to expose them to dynamics and manipulating colour.
Don’t forget to include non-vocal warm-ups. These are important as well and can include exercises such as lightly shaking limbs and stretching the neck to help reducing tension and raising energy levels.
Teenagers
Into the teenage years, the fun games tend to be less effective and can be replaced with analogies and imagery.
Some examples can include thinking there is an apple, or a tennis ball between your back teeth, and sing a minor triad up and down on ‘vee’. This immediately opens the throat and with that comes a higher chance for a resonance. The preceding ‘v’ consonant can activate the breath and give the pitch energy and accuracy before the vowel.
You could also try, for example, singing on ‘nor’ moving from (intervals) 5-3-4-2-1. Aiming for musical smoothness by ‘seeing’ the notes in front of you as one continuous line rather than as stepwise movement increases balance and evenness of breath. Singing an arpeggio all staccato is a great way to ensure that tension is minimal in the jaw and neck, and the breath is doing the work to create the sound.
During the teenage years, it is important to slowly start adding a few more technical points to consider, and setting your warm-up goals a little higher. Stretching the neck is still brilliantly helpful for singers in this age group. Try adding in a few breath exercises such as letting out a steady stream of air on an ‘ssss’ or on a vocalised ‘thhhhhh’. This brings attention to the diaphragm which can be helpful, especially during the eventual transition of male voices, which relies heavily on appropriate breathing control to remain healthy through this time. Another consideration may be accessing your falsetto range; playing around here can help blend it in with your changed voice when things settle.
Adults
In the adult years, the type of warm-up stays relatively similar to the junior years. Silly vowels and words are still quite important to your vocal development. On top of this, try to healthily and safely extend your vocal range higher and lower while experimenting with a variety of tone colours. Another important element to work on developing is a deeper sense of expression, musicality and performance-wise while singing.
Indeed, your warm-up may even change in structure, and evolve to include a short canon, or even one of your own pieces of repertoire, but singing it all on a particular vowel. At this stage, thinking about detail also becomes important. Key details such as vowel onsets, phrase shapes, knee tension and gestures are some things for you to consider as you warm-up.
An all-time favourite warm-up exercise is the lip trill. Imagine you are trying to feed a baby their food, but they are stubbornly refusing. To entice them, you make the aeroplane sound with your lips, moving the spoon like an aircraft until it ‘lands’ in the baby’s mouth. That sound you make is called a lip trill: applying light contact the lips, a then exhaling and vocalising to make the lips freely move. This is a fantastic warm-up that I know all of my coaches use, as I do too! It’s a fantastic tool to create an engagement with your air supply, it’s great for enhancing energy and stability in the sound, and it can be used in all places of your range! Try it out, and see what you think!
Warm-up in Style
So now you know exactly how long to warm-up for, and what with! Some variations will occur in warming up your voice if you decide to focus on a particular style of singing. Pop singers may practice their belting range in a warm-up, and look at trying some riffs, runs, hits and embellishments to prepare them for a song. Opera singers will warm-up with a lot of stretching to loosen all tension, engaging their central breathing muscles, and singing a lot of open vowels to get a clear and anchored tone. Jazz singers may use a much lighter style in their warm-up, especially across their upper range, and could warm-up using a scatting technique. Country singers may want to try adding a little bit of extra brightness or twang to their overall sound.
Warm-up options are plentiful so if the ideas or suggestions do not suit your needs simply use this as a guide to finding appropriate warm ups that cater to your specific vocal needs and abilities.
Most importantly, always take the time to warm up healthily and properly to maximise your performance and preserve your voice.