How to warm up your voice for singing (BEST 3 Exercises)

[Music] hey guys I'm Madeline Harvey and thank you so much for joining me today I wanted to devote some time and guide you through a really great warm-up routine that you can do every time you get prepared to sing so if you liked today's video please be sure to give it a thumbs up alright click that subscribe button below I would love to see you here more often I'm gonna share with you some of my favorite warm-up exercises that I like to do every time we're gonna focus in on the essentials of what makes a really great warm-up routine we're then going to take those exercises and tweak them just a little bit to make them slightly more difficult to add to your growing skill level and ability the exercise is used in today's video are designed to present a layered vocal experience for you we're gonna focus in on the areas of the voice that are used for power coordination and amplification because it can be really confusing right deciding what exercises do we even need to do as a good warm-up the important aspect is to remember that a good warm-up is all about waking up your internal spaces as well as reminding your muscles of what it is that's going to be expected of them and you're singing and what they can do to help support you so regardless of what exercises you end up choosing in your warmups you want to look at it like that and it's always important to think of it as a layered experience that focuses in on power coordination and amplification with that being said I also want to encourage you to bring in an attitude of deliberateness into your warmups warmup in the same way that you would perform live on stage with that same elevation of energy and commitment are you ready to get started here we go we are going to begin at the source activating the diaphragm as our first exercise in any warm-up is a wonderful way to get you started your diaphragm is your engine of power so we're gonna get in there we're gonna start it we're gonna rev it and then we're gonna dig deep as launch our breath into our tone or amplifier so what I want you to get a sense of is the ability to support your sound dynamically but without tension or manipulation better set we are getting in there we're going to observe but we're going to let go of the control so how do we do that a good way to start is getting a sense of an F sound so I'd like for you to do three short F sounds for me real quick and just notice what you notice in the area right under your ribcage so if we went go ahead and try that good very very good you probably noticed that your diaphragm contracted in response to that consonant there wasn't much that you had to do do you see what I'm saying that it feels reflexive it just happens right this is what we're getting into with a really great dynamic breath support so as we're gonna do this exercise I'm gonna break it down a little bit for you we're gonna break it down into two parts the first thing I need you to do is sit up nice and tall or stand nice and tall and then I want you to sort of pretend that you get sort of punched right in your solar plexus and OH fall back very good this is horrible posture for singing but please play with me here we are going to just let go of our ABS that really great feeling when you just let go of your belly maybe you've had too much to eat but in this position we can relax our ABS and we can get a sense of the anterior workings of our body yeah I get a sense of that just feel the space under your ribcage excellent very good good so now we're going to sort of mimic a baby bouncing on a lap okay because now we're about to apply some voice to it but we don't want to lose support so we're gonna mimic a maybe bouncing on a lap with our mouth completely closed I would like for you to just feel like a hum go ahead and try that just notice what you notice there's no wrong go ahead and try that feel that as you're so down shifted so relaxed that that little left of the diaphragm is enough to just sort of move the body a little bit just a little bit we're not going for flailing just a little movement of the body in the same way that a baby would balance and a laugh a lap so from here let's try that again let's try a different pitch just get crazy could explore it wonderful very very good so now that you have a little bit of a sense of it go ahead and lift back to an acceptable posture of singing very good but don't lose your connectivity feel so precisely that reflexive lift of the diaphragm what this is gonna do you'll see here in a minute but this bouncing the subtle lift of the diaphragm that subtle bounce is gonna energize your sound it's gonna give your singing and your phrasing such a wonderful momentum and I'll demonstrate that here in a second so here we are we're gonna adjust our our tone into a whoo a very Oxford England now not necessarily the collapsed version that some Americans will attribute like hoo hoo hoo we want now you notice that this shape defaults a little bit to the head voice which is totally fine totally fine it's completely safe but what we're gonna do now that we've got that sense of the lifting from the diaphragm and the shape of our of our tone of our face is we're going to Rev we're going to bounce on the note five times like okay and if you're a visual learner or if you would like to conceptualize visually I want you to imagine that our sound is like a child drawing waves of the ocean just like a series of triangles okay and it doesn't need to be loud this is not about amplification right now okay this is about activation of the diaphragm so do not split your focus state wholly focused here okay here we go [Music] [Music] good good good and if you need to let's just sort of reset our body if you need to stop a little bit to feel that go ahead and do that this is your warmup [Music] [Music] good and rest good very good so let's not forget this who Tom a chose in the shape for you because it's a really wonderful sound that although it defaults a little bit to the head voice meaning it's going to be a little lighter and slightly thinner in sound there's less of a chance that any gripping under the chin or the muscles of the next is going to happen the neck is going to happen so this will allow you to focus entirely on that that revving action and let's not forget your diaphragm is your source it is where everything happens it's where your dynamic style interpretation happens not to mention having that ability to what is it called diaphragmatic dexterity will give you a lot of vitality for other artistic things such as style interpretations licks trills runs riffs and vibrato okay so I did say a second ago that I would give you a demonstration of how this sort of like subtle bounce in a sound sounds in a like a song so let's see here in my mind okay so if I just say a normal sound my muffin top is all that whole grain low fat I know you want a piece of that but I just wanna dance okay no diaphragmatic support no dynamic lifting there but if I go my muffin top is oh that Oh grain low fat I know you want a piece of that but I just fall in a dance I can't even oh cool but what I'm trying to illustrate is that rolling into it so as you're playing with it feel that you can always slide that scale in terms of a little bit less a little bit more but go to the diaphragm for absolutely everything that you need okay so now let's talk about turning this exercise into it's more difficult counterpart we actually started on the slightly more difficult counterpart if you find that that who is good for you then what you're gonna want to do is graduate your space so starting from who then you can go into uh and then into an awe of a more open tone but what you want to do is make sure that you can have that consistency of that bounce you're not gonna want to control it in the muscles of your neck you're just going to want to breathe through it okay another thing that you can do is just close your mouth altogether and hum [Music] hmm can you hear that style and play there and then if you're looking to get a little frisky err you can move it into a lip trill okay I personally favor the lip trill the best but the who is also a wonderful place to start excellent moving on so now that we've activated your diaphragm now we're gonna bring in the vocal cord coordination so earlier today I talked about your warm up being a layered experience for your voice we're gonna take that action that revving action of the diaphragm and then we're going to add vocal cord coordination and flexibility to that so this is our pattern for exercise we're gonna go it's very fast but let me assure you this quick rapid movement of jumping from high to low to high to low to high to low is gonna increase you know it's gonna make your vocal cords adaptable shapeable moldable flexible and quickly right because music is all of those things all of those things so what we're gonna do is we're gonna close our mouth I'm gonna teach you how to find each piece of this and then put it together go ahead and close your mouth take two fingers put them on your chest give me a slight a little grunts it's a little grunt it's a deeper chord coordination a little bit more muscle fiber and then we're gonna use that Reb of that diaphragm to launch the tone into the face using the diaphragm to move my voice cool and I'm just gonna go back and forth back and forth back and forth when you do this you're building wonderful chord strength very important to think of that so go ahead and place your fingers here this will grunt mmm fingers here just let it go try that a couple times can you feel how that rather the diaphragm moves the voice let's try it a couple more times and then we'll put the exercise together good also important to notice keep the mouth closed when you close the mouth you emphasize the musculature inside of the larynx so we're gonna start here here we go and I'm gonna give you a slight adjustment just like I did in the previous exercise for the visual learners out there I want you to think of it's not so much visual but I want you to generate some very real excitement about that we're gonna let it go but we're gonna get excited about it in the same way that you know sometimes you eat something it's like really good it's a little crazy a little crazy it will really really help you [Music] oh just pausing for a second you feel that that higher note happens because of that the revving of the diaphragm we're leaning into that upper note but we're not right when I'm getting too stressed about that [Music] very good very good it's a little crazy and I want to go ahead and apologize for that but there's importance in moving with speed that way because if you have a tendency to use the exterior muscles of your neck these muscles are slow-moving they're big they're thick they're clumsy and the impulse for their movement is a little slower so when you are able to move quickly focusing on mmm using that diaphragm to launch the sound into the face is less less of a likelihood that you're gonna grap sort of catch the sound before it gets into the head so think of it like that and then gradually speed it up if that's your fancy okay to make it a little harder it's already hard as it is but if you'd like to make it a little bit harder simply open your mouth and just see what happens it's pretty dramatic but I do want to emphasize that when the mouth is closed it gives the interior muscles of the larynx the workout so this truly is a vocal cord coordination workout but it's wonderful and building chord strength and releasing tension from the higher notes wonderful let's move on and now we arrive at amplification this is going to be awesome we're gonna play with the ng sound but we're just gonna tweak it just a little bit so that we can be very punchy very awesome with our voices but let me explain why mg is important just exactly what we're gonna do with it to make it crazy and why that's important as well and then we'll get into the exercise so ng is considered a sort of miracle sound in the vocal world and it's a wonderful way of sort of sort of getting to know the elusive resonator that's referred to as the mix now the mix in how we're going to explore it today is that space and our throw where our throat meets our nasal cavity so we feel the sort of concave action happening and that back here is our sweet spot so in order to really understand amplification of tone you have to work with this resonator with the mix with the in G now simultaneously the ng removes strain removes pressure removes tension from the throat so it's wonderful so let's break this down go ahead and say the word sing before me go ahead nice and slow mm-hmm probably noticed a couple of things I probably noticed Howie the tip of your tongue stayed connected to the bottom teeth the back of the bottom teeth but the heel of your tongues are lifted to touch the soft palate this shuts off your mouth as a resonator entirely which is very important when isolating the mix now if we say singing a couple more times you probably notice that the mg also has a tendency to sort of default to head voice now this is also true but we're not gonna fight it we're not gonna resist it what we're gonna do is reinforce the mix through the head voice so that that part of the voice can be just as strong as your chest voice so if you're familiar with my videos you're probably already familiar with the fact that I really enjoy what I call a temporary coordination now a temporary coordination it's just sort of a means to accentuating one resonator so that it can eventually become strong enough to assist in the balancing of the other two so you might have noticed you have a dominant area of your voice let's just say it's your chest voice or you may have another dominant area of your voice let's say that's your head voice but right in middle where that mixed voice should be it's kind of like a vocal no-man's land so what we need to do it's entirely possible that we need to over accentuate the mix so that it can become strong enough to really blending and balancing all three together the mix is really the glue that holds the other two together we're gonna feel that and when you when you bring the mix into the equation you can hear a distinct presence of all three resonators within your sound and they sort of share the responsibility for the tone you don't hear one is too much than the other you hear just such a lovely mixture of all three so to find this through a temporary coordination through in G what we're gonna do is we're going to say ng and we're going to put it in a vocal exercise but we're gonna say it as if we're cats about to fight so really feel if you've never seen cats about to fight it's the craziest like scariest thing in the world I mean whoa so we're going to accentuate and amplify the sound off the back here it's called pharyngeal this is the type of sound that we're gonna play with and we're going to overlap our registration so we can bring all those resonators together so let's go ahead and try that we're not even gonna right now just [Music] here in the Hat we can hear the revving of a diaphragm we can hear the amplification of the sound we can also hear the coordination but nothing is losing balance everything is maintaining balance so that's crucial so as you play with this temporary sounder really want you to give yourself permission to play go for it the more I can feel the more you make obvious to your body what that feels like the stronger your mix becomes and like I say it's the glue that holds the other two together so as we start here and we're just gonna sort of play around so we're not gonna go we're gonna be cats about to fight so here actually let's start a little higher shall we feel that go ahead and just play with me play with me [Music] [Music] yeah that's about to fade I'm really sharp that wasn't weak here we go but really go fast I'm gonna make him know then we're gonna take this down can probably feel that turning [Music] [Music] very good indeed indeed so again play at your leisure as you take your own time with things it is not important to even use a piano your own voice is raw material is enough because you can go you could hear a distinct presence of the three resonators sort of coming together to share responsibility for that shifting nature of tune get it don't feel that very good very very good so as you're playing with this feel it turn this will really bring you into amplification so it's kind of by means of really isolating that one spot so don't be in a hurry to drop the mouth or open the mouth or just go you know try it once and then jump into an open tone this is something that you really have to work with that mix is something that we really have to work at because it is the glue that holds all three resonators together and again they share responsibility for the overall tone so it's gonna need some work it's gonna need some steps and some nurturing but when you are ready I'm gonna show you what you can do to make it a little harder when you're ready I want you to use tone to use shapes okay if we have no shapes we create collapse and collapse is kind of like the the killer of tone there's no it's like dull there's no open space for that tone to be amplified that that sound to be amplified so knowing that go from ng and slide the jaw forward uh-huh we're gonna fish lip our sound a little and we're gonna be a lot Al Capone you're wanting to find by way of your own acoustics your own head what feels very penny what feels very alive in terms of resonance but when you find it you really want to milk it and keep that tone open in the same way that you would play an instrument so huh yeah and then build your sound around that shape so when you're ready and you're maybe using this video to warm up I want you to use their nerf in place of the ng cats fighting but when you are ready take your time my friends but there you have it your three exercises that you can use in your warmup every time I hope that you found this video helpful and chock-full of resources for you if you liked it please be sure to give it a thumbs up or click the subscribe button below I would love to have you as a member of my musical family and if you have any questions don't be a stranger leave them in the comments below thank you so much for joining me today and I will see you next time bye bye [Music]

Channel: Madeleine Harvey

Views: 358,270

Rating: 4.943934 out of 5

Keywords: Madeleine Harvey, Best Exercises for warming up your voice, How to warm up your voice for singinig, Sing with power, Diaphragm breathing, warm ups for singers, 3 best exercises for warming up your voice, Vocal warm up exercises, Best Vocal warm up, Singing warm up, Warm up for singing, Singer warm ups, Stregthen the voice

Id: L-8VjsyATPs

Length: 29min 16sec (1756 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017