Warming up before singing is like stretching before playing sports; it keeps your body safe and prepares you to perform your best. While there are many ways to do this, in this article we will share a universal vocal warmup that work for nearly everyone’s voice! 

Big Slides

This exercise goes by many names: slides, sirens, yawns and many more! For all that nomenclature they are actually very simple to do. Start by finding a nice and easy head voice, then slowly glide down in pitch until you reach the comfortable bottom of your chest voice. Once you have completed this movement, do the opposite! Glide from your comfortable low chest voice up through your break and into your comfortable light head voice. 

These slides take us through our entire range in a light and easy way, allowing us to stretch our vocal muscles and get a sense of how our high and low notes are feeling. 

Remember, when doing this exercise as a warmup do your best to keep everything light and easy! We don’t want to prematurely add any weight while we are preparing our voice to sing. 

Lip Trills 

After completing a few big slides it is common for singers to do some lip trills. Lip trills are one of the most common vocal exercises and are used for building the range and smoothing out the voice. When using lip trills for a warmup keep them in a comfortable range. We want to loosen up by going over our break, but there is no need to work up to our extreme highs or lows! 

Humming

Humming is a great way to stretch out the voice as it is very hard to push with your mouth closed! Choose an easy scale, either a major triad arpeggio or a 5 tone scale and work slowly through your range comfortable range. With humming singers can really feel the crackly bits working off their voice as they move around their range! 

Vowels 

Afterwards, it’s time to work out some vowels! A great way to loosing up is to go through your vowels on a single note in your middle range, and move this a little bit up and down. There’s no need to work out too high or too low here! 

Try to go through “Ah, Eh, Ee, Oh, Ooh”! Remember to keep things light and comfortable and to try your best to not move your mouth too much to change the sounds. 

Light Song Run Through

After your exercises try to run through some of your songs at 50% energy. Think of this like basketball players shooting around before tip off! You want to make sure your motion and body are feeling good, but you don’t want to tire yourself out before game time! 

Closing Notes

While the above is a fantastic general warmup, there is nothing better than a customized routine created with a fantastic teacher! Contact us today to work with one of Toronto’s best vocal coaches!