Tag Archives: Vocal Technique

Vocal Warm-Ups or Vocal Damage

23 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by in Musicians and Singers

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I am privileged to work with many singers and music artists.  Usually, my first question to them has to be, “What are your warm-up exercises?”  About 80-90% of these people will have no planned disciplined warm-up technique.

Would a runner start into a full on sprint without stretching?  Do most athletes just start their sport without conditioning the body first?  No!  Most athletes integrate a warm up routine as a necessity before a game or competition.  Why?  It requires a physiological preparation to sustain, work at your maximum and minimize the possibility of a strain or injury.

I think if you have read this far, you are possibly getting the point I am trying to make.  Most singers start into a full-on performance mode without awakening, strengthening and preparing the voice.

I work locally with voice clinics and music professionals trying to remedy the abuse caused by singers who think they’re above vocal abuse.  A majority of the time when they are consulting with me, they have started on a difficult journey of recovering what they’ve lost.  Most of this started by simply not warming up the voice properly to allow disciplined healthy technique to ignite their brain, diaphragmatic muscles and placement.

Throughout my life I have been taught many counteractive warm-up techniques.  I tend to act like a David against the Philistines of bad vocal warm-up techniques.  Most vocal warm-ups have been inherited by choral conductors and music teachers, but they have no physiological reasoning or understanding for their purpose or lack thereof.  Remember, the voice is a physical instrument and every consonant and vowel sound carries a proclivity for helping or hurting the singer.  As a music professional, I’ve spent countless hours researching the physiology of vocal sound production and have become quite aware of the interactions of vowel and consonant sounds and their pros and cons for the singer.  It’s imperative that a warm-up allow the singer to slowly and deliberately stretch the voice in the right direction without causing injury or encouraging bad habits.

Let me put together a basic warm-up that can be expanded on, but will teach you some healthy principles of warming up the voice.

  1. Start with a lip buzz or “zzz” sound.  Do not place a defined pitch sequence to this exercise, a single moderately scaled tone is sufficient.  Make certain you are getting full breaths.  It’s also important that you aren’t just sustaining the sound, but you are also diaphragmatically pulsating the sound.  I call it belly pooching. It feels like you are making a noise in a circular motion.   This is like caffeine for the diaphragm.  In the age of computer and t.v. slouch, it’s imperative that we engage and awaken our muscles that are supporting our breath before we combine it with any pitch sequence.  Remember, no vowels!  Just buzz your lips like a bee or use the consonant “z”. It’s necessary to remind the brain and the muscles to engage properly.
  2. When starting to add a pitch sequence (five tone scale, etc.), this is where most choral directors, music teachers and singers go down the path of negative warm-up exercises. They combine warm-ups with back/guttural vowel sounds. These vowels like buh, boe, bah and boo naturally want to resonate in the throat and the singer needs to learn not make dark sounds which create more tension on the vocal cords/flanges.   Frontal/nasal Vowels like Bee and Bih and a neutral/central vowel like Bye are healthy  initial warm-up vowels because they assist in keeping your tone open and not create negative pressure on the voice.   When these vowels are combined with voiced plosive consonants like B, D, Guh or the nasal consonants M, and N.  It assists the singer in keeping away from tension, engaging the diaphragm and also feeling a healthy and forward placement.  Most people engage their placement too low  in their a speaking voice.  It’s imperative that placement for warm-ups utilize a brighter tone to offset the tendencies and pitfalls of the speaking voice. Remember, no back/guttural vowels for the initial pitched warm-up. Utilize the help of frontal/nasal vowels combined with plosive and nasal consonants  to gently stretch the voice.
  3. Start in a comfortable area of your range when warming up with pitched exercises. Starting at the ultimate lowest or higher part of your voice can engage bad habits by overworking or underworking placement and immobilizing proper breath support.  I prefer not to stretch the voice to an ultimate note incipiently, but slowly work down in the vocal range and back up to the higher range.  It is equivalent to a muscle stretch where you gently work to achieve your optimum range of motion.
  4. What I like to call “ballistic vocal stretching exercises” i.e. siren sounds, help to gently stretch and relax the voice. Glide the voice up and down in a wave like sound and motion, using frontal/nasal or central/neutral vowels and plosive consonants. Starting at the lowest pitch and quickly gliding to the highest pitch and back down. This helps to eliminate vocal tension. Males this is not just an exercise for females! Don’t be afraid of your head voice/upper range.
  5. When working through a pitched warm-up sequence make sure to utilize all of the vowel families. Start with the frontal/nasals vowels, then what I call frontal/maxillary vowels bay, beh and bah and lastly the back/guttural vowels.  By sequentially moving from the most forward placement to the back/darker vowels it helps the brain and muscles to better engage a healthy placement and secure tone.

*vowels have been simplified for understanding and do not follow IPA phonetic chart spelling.

Remember, warm-ups aren’t elective for a singer, but are necessary in keeping a healthy voice.   Get a warm-up plan or let a music instructor  help you maximize your vocal needs.  It might feel awkward at first, but you will get use to it and see, feel and hear a major difference in your performance.

For more information contact: Stephen Nix snix77@yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Importance of Breath Planning and The Singer

02 Monday Mar 2015

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singerThis topic about breath planning sounds boring to most singers, but it’s probably the most important topic for singers.  Breath is the very basic foundation of pitch and tone.  If proper breath is not present, it leaves the singer vulnerable to “wiping out” vocally.  So, here is my attempt at very simply opening the door to looking at the reality and effectiveness of proper breath planning.

I am privileged to get to work almost daily with singers of varying degrees of experience, but I find the professional and the beginning vocalist have one thing in common, “the inability to plan where they should breathe.”  As simple as it may sound, it’s not as easy and intuitive as one would like to think.   The Rock n’ Roll or Pop artist states, “I just wants to feel it and not mess up my vibe.”  The R&B singer says, “I’ll just lock into the groove and breathe when necessary.”  The Country singer declares, “I’ll breath when I run out of air.”  I hear undisciplined talk like this on a regular basis.   I could go on including all genres of music, but I will save your reading time from prolonged agony of undisciplined singers.  All of these singers have one thing in common, they have no idea that planning where and how to breath is as important as knowing the song itself.  Any small change in their performance could set them on a pitchy runway just because of no breath mapping.

Even with education and knowledge of how to do things, it’s very easy to get sloppy and forget important techniques like breath planning.   We spend the majority of time finding the right song and learning it, but we never map out a healthy way of helping our voice to consistently sing the song.  Most singers would rather live in the landmine of not knowing what to do, than acting like a consummate professional and never letting the audience see you run out of air.  To be honest, there is no sense in a vocalist running out of air when they have time to develop a strategy and memorize that strategy for breathing.

I’m very aware there are several school of thoughts on breath support, but I will not be tackling these concepts.  I want to just address breath planning.  A choreographer would never freestyle dance on every routine, but would have some plan.  Singers?!?  Do you get it?!?!?  Devise a plan for where you take a breath.  Here are a few helpful hints:

1. Read The Lyrics First.  For some reason singers forget the fact that a lyric is a musical script.  Like regular patterns of speech we have natural pauses, held and shortened inflections.  The lyric has places where stopping is necessary.  You wouldn’t talk in a consistent run-on monotone sound would you?  Why would you sing without taking natural pauses/breathes?   This simple yet proven technique is easy.  Read the lyric and feel how you would speak it.  Your natural inflections and pauses are cues for breaths.  If the song is poorly written it will not follow the natural prosody of speech and probably shouldn’t be sung.

2. Mark The Breaths On The Music or Lyric Sheet.  A visual cue of where to breath is the first step for helping you memorize where to breath. You may find you have to edit your visual breath cue/map based on practice and taking into account some of these  listed principles.  Don’t just mark some breathing spots without observing.  Strategically think and listen. By the way, mark it in pencil for updates or changes.

3. Punctuation Can Give Hints For Breaths.  If you would put a comma, semicolon, period, exclamation point or question mark, it might be a place where a breath would naturally fit.  Don’t overlook the value of the natural inflection and pauses of inferred punctuation. These are places where a breath would naturally fit.

4. Smaller Phrases Are More Parallel To Natural Speech Than Long Held Phrases.  There is no said rule to must make every phrase a 4 measure breath phrase. To think that one general rule applies to everything is bad musicality.  Every song will dictate a different breath plan depending on lyric and tempo.  I encourage singers to think of smaller phrases even some phrases that only last one word.  Breath as often as you can.  We are not olympic athletes trying to win a medal on sustained breath.   Grooved songs and lyrically intimate songs will most benefit from breathing more often than sustained breaths.  Remember, even a sentence has breaks within it.  Smaller phrases are healthier for a singer.

5. Let Syncopation Be Your Camouflage Breath Aid.  When I see dotted rhythms I immediately think a singer might can take a quick breath cheat.   Breathing after a dotted rhythm can give the sound an illusion of a deeper groove and it can eliminate the singer from running out of air.  It’s a way of breaking a long phrase into a smaller section.  When you have a long set of songs, you want to insure you have the breath to manage it.  Don’t try to be the world’s strongest sustained breather. Make it easy for you.  Breath smart and as often as tastefully possible and try to not physically exhaust yourself when it’s unnecessary.  Look for places like syncopated rhythms to get that extra breath.

6. Held Notes Can Scream Breath Before or After.  I find singers don’t set up enough air before a held not nor do they utilize a good breath after a held note.   Be aware of those longs notes and how you set them up and how you use them as a breath opportunity after they are sung.

7. Choreography and Breathing Often Make Good Friends.  If dancing is involved or any amount of movement, give yourself a break by breathing more often.  It’s critical to build up the physical ability to manage both breath and movement.  Exercise and core work help the singer build endurance, but be your friend and break your phrases into small segments when choreography is involved.

8. When Nerves Are In Play Don’t Make Breath Spaces Too Far Apart.  I tell singers when nervousness gets the best of you, it’s very easy to forget all technique and you let it fall by the wayside.  Pre-planning shorter breathing places when practicing will help the singer from becoming too nervous about running out of air.   The more air that is moving the more calm and confident the singer will feel.  So, let yourself sing small breath phrases.  Don’t feel like you have to hold your breath for a sentenced phrase. Let the natural pause of a sentence help you find a space to make the phrase smaller.  Shorter planned breath phrases help eliminate the nervousness.

9. Words Ending In Plosive Consonants Are Singer’s Air Pockets.  I have spent a significant amount of time studying and researching the science of vowels and consonants in music and the voice. Plosive consonants voiced or unvoiced B, D, G, P, T or K at the end of a word help to fully close words and technically assist the singer in sneaking a breath without people knowing.  If you have to break up a difficult phrase, this is a great way to do it with ease and without being detected.  Look for those plosive consonants at the end of words.

Be realistic about breath planning and be very diligent about mapping and memorizing where you can breath.  When you rehearse your breaths they will become a part of the  song and will almost be an automated, proactive response versus a desperate, reactive madness.   Breathing is paramount to a singer’s ability.  Make your breath planning a focused and intentional part of learning a song.