A quick warm-up

May be, a better question to start is: What is “that” we warm-up, when we warm-up the voice?

First of all, I must say, I am not the “traditional recipe” type of singer.  More than a cook with a recipe, I can be like a fierce voice safety guard, watching after its freedom… making nasty noises, spuky sirens or tornado blows to make sure the enemy keeps far away . 

Creating everyday the path I need to meet my voice, to get us moving in the same direction, sounds like a more creative and fulfilling plan than a standardized recipe for me. Optimal and standard, don’t fit together.

Every singer needs to create this path everyday… It is a playful activity that enhances performance. 

After 35 years of experience with myself and 20 with clients, I can say, warm-up needs sensitive awareness to mind the gap between involuntary and voluntary voice work …. To make conscious and unconscious voice work congruent.

We need awareness to tune ourselves to contact our voice sound exactly where it is – and not where we would like our sound to be.

A warm-up is more like a path we go. If we have a good variety of tools and our senses are present, we can go through wild scrubs, water, steep hillsides or wild jungles and still have a resilient voice.

A mindmap

A quick warm-up, is as short or as long as needed, to tune: ourselves (our senses)our body & our ears, in order to find out what exercise you need, your voice needs right now to wake up singing functions… and finally enrich your voice sound.

If you have an extrovert and loud perfectionist in your inner team, I tell you, she/he will expect a “ready to go” sound from the beginning. May be, it would be a good idea to connect to the curious researcher in yourself. It is a good partner when you start your daily voice journey.

▪️A smooth start could be humming or singing glissandi in fifth intervals, in piano. Or even better, in a free style, like a sirene, gliding through the middle range, on a smooth sound.

There, you make sure you connect as well with the smoothest onset you can produce… which means a voice-start with less friction and therefore more sound for less effort.

▪️Singing a vocalise with long notes at the very beginning is not helpful. If you didn’t achieve range flexibility or tune registers yet , long notes might sound stiff.

▪️After a smooth start, checking how the voice’s  “state of now” is, I could follow with some fluent and agile legato exercise and see how this works, like 1-3-2-4-3-5-4-2-1 or 1-3-5-8-5-3-1, just to name an example.

▪️After building the first bridges to my sound, I start tuning, warming up functions and building more bridges to connect them:

• vowel adjustment
• register building and coordination
• pitch adjustment
• grounding tuning
• articulation
• long notes
• messa di voce ( crescendo-decrescendo)
• staccato agility & coloratura

 If you are a musical or pop singer, you will work on:

• register building and coordination
• pitch adjustment
• grounding
• articulation
• belting & twang
• long notes 
• crescendo-decrescendo

This article can grow long if I start to name exercises for every thing we can tune.

And that’s not all.

Tuning expectations

No matter if you are working on registration or juggling with high notes, in every step we actually warm up our nervous system to read the signals the body shows and get closer to the harmonics that are missing.

We read our body language to tune to our voice and we explore our sound with our ears, like detectives.

Sharpening senses, we warm up ourselves first, to warm up our voice afterwards.

We regulate our expectations according to what it’s possible inside our voice’s state-of-now. It doesn’t mean we have to keep “safe” all the way through. We should have challenges here and there, because there is where transformation happens. 

However, challenges want to be attuned to expectations and expectations want to fit more or less our nervous system tolerance window. Otherwise, frustration and fatigue are around the corner.

In general, I can say:

▪️The more experienced you are, the more functions an exercise can include at the same time.

▪️The more experienced you are, the quicker you can activate the different functions.

▪️The more experienced you are, the more information you can get from your own sound.

▪️The more experienced you are, the more tools for every situation you have in your treasure-box.

▪️The more experienced you are, the quicker you can access all functions.

Novice spirit

And even every professional singer needs anyway an “Anfänger Geist” – a novice spirit – to get every day in contact to all the signals our body and our voice sends …. for quick or slow. Sometimes it needs to be: a quick warm up, with the ingredients that you find convenient for your voice right now.

As quick as it can still provide overall the sense of safeness. One, that takes you to your “voice home”, above everything else. Once the safety doors are open and you feel “home”, you will be able to take more risks, with excitement and playfulness.

Don’t forget vocalises are not the only way to warm-up. After a couple of exercises, you can continue warming up with a song.

Letting your body and your ears curiously play with your sound, makes a warm-up a creative & tailored daily experience.

Tailored to your voice’s state-of-now. Always. 

Quick or slow .