Written by Noor Bhatia
Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned professional, building a good vocal warm-up routine is crucial for all singers. Warming up before singing prevents vocal strain and injuries, prepares you for technically difficult passages and helps you access your full range. With consistent practice, you can also improve your tone, resonance, vocal agility and range.
In this article, we’ll explore five essential vocal exercises every singer should incorporate into their warm-up routine. But before warming up our voices, let’s talk about warming up our bodies.
Warm Up Your Body Before Your Voice
The human voice is a temperamental instrument and can be easily affected by unnecessary body tension and poor posture. This is why starting your warm-up routine with light stretches can be very helpful. Simple exercises like shoulder rolls, neck stretches, and gentle torso twists can help release strain and allow for a more relaxed and controlled vocal performance.
Although full-body stretches would yield the best results, if you’re pressed for time, here’s a quick 5-minute video with some basic upper-body stretches to kickstart your warmup routine:
1. Get that Breath Moving First
Breath control is one of the fundamental components of singing. A lack of efficient breath control while singing can lead to incomplete phrases, pitching issues, strained vocal folds, etc. Don’t worry — you can incorporate breathing exercises straight into your daily warm-ups.
One such exercise is ‘the hiss’. This involves taking a deep, low breath and releasing it through a hissing ‘sss’ sound. You can alternate long, sustained hisses with short, staccato ones to fully engage your core muscles and develop a consistent airflow.
2. SOVT Exercises — What are They?
In simple terms, Semi-Occluded Vocal Tract (SOVT) exercises involve partially closing your mouth while singing to create back pressure, which allows you to sing with minimal strain. SOVT exercises are great for warm-ups, especially if you’re getting back to singing after a while, or if you’ve been sick and want to gently rehabilitate your voice and get it back into singing shape.
One such SOVT exercise involves singing through a straw into a glass of water, making sure that the straw doesn’t touch the bottom. You can incorporate any normal warm-up patterns like arpeggios or ascending and descending fifths into this straw exercise.
If you don’t have a straw handy, you can try out other common SOVT exercises like lip buzzing (blowing air through relaxed lips, creating a ‘brrrr’ sound), tongue trills (sustained rolled ‘r’ sound) or singing through fricative consonant sounds such ‘vv’ or ‘zh’.
Check out this video to learn more about SOVT exercises:
3. Ring it out! — Nasal ‘NG’ Sound
Resonance is key to a clear and well-projected singing voice. Singing through nasal sounds like the ‘NG’ sound can help you find your mask resonance, relax your larynx, and develop a powerful, ringy voice.
To do this exercise, you can use the word ‘sing’ to help you find the nasal ‘NG’ sound. Again, you can incorporate any normal melodic warm-up patterns and sing through them, while maintaining the twangy sound.
Here’s a video that explains this exercise in more detail:
4. Sirening
Vocal sirens involve smoothly gliding from your lowest to your highest note and back down again. This is a great exercise to help you warm up your voice quickly when you don’t have the time for a full warm-up as it takes you through your entire vocal range in just a few minutes.
By integrating vocal sirens into your warm-up routine, you can learn to maintain a consistent tone over different vocal registers and increase vocal agility, making it an extremely effective exercise for all singers.
5. And Finally — Tongue Circles
As mentioned earlier, tension in the body can easily translate into vocal strain and can even cause vocal injuries. The tongue, being one of the strongest muscles in the body, can be one such source of tension. You can release tension in your tongue by sweeping it over your teeth in a circular motion, in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions, as shown in this video:
These exercises help you work on your breath support, tone consistency, vocal agility, projection, resonance, pitching issues, and much more.
Armed with these exercises, you are now ready to build your own vocal warm-up routine and are one step closer to achieving your dream voice.
Off to the practice room now!
If you’re interested in learning more about the singing voice, consider checking out this great reading list of books on vocal techniques.