Warm ups, Tips and Exercises
Here you’ll find The Basics Course, which is a free, ten-part overview of everything you need to start exploring useful vocal technique, as well as some beautiful-to-sing warm ups and exercises. Enjoy!
The Basics Course
A free offering filled with enough to start you singing your heart out.
We explore baggage, understand nerves, touch on how to use your body and breath, answer the question ‘can you sing in tune?’, find different registers and explore words.
Much goodness, and a great place to start understanding and exploring your voice.
1. Welcome!
This course is ten short videos filled with ideas, tips and exercises to help you understand your voice, and to explore and develop and adventure with it.
It’s enough to get you started, to realise this ain’t so scary afterall, and to show you that there really is useful stuff that you are capable of learning.
It’s like an encouraging pep talk which also happens to be filled with easily applicable and useful practical vocal technique tips. Winning.
Maybe you’ll work your way through this and be ready to sing a song round the campfire, or rock up to that community choir, or sing a song to your kids. The world is your musical oyster! You can watch the videos in order, or jump to whichever one is of interest to you. Topics covered include understanding baggage, understanding nerves, using your body, brain and breath, exploring words and register and singing in tune.
The Scrummy Warm Ups
These warm ups are delicious to sing, as well as useful, as well as cathartic. Enjoy them!
For each one, I give you a version with me singing, and a version without. I suggest starting with me, and once you are familiar with it, and if you want, sing without me.
I also suggest just one technical idea to pay attention to while singing them.
The Uplifting Call and Response
I really cannot gush about how much I love singing this one. It is delight in warm up form. It feels like a morning filled with excited promise.
What to focus on
1. Become familiar with it, and be kind to yourself if you don’t copy back exactly. Aim for that, through repetition and listening (singing silently in your mind is great for this) if you want that, and delight in your own variations if you want that.
2. One technical idea to focus on is to feel as though your body is doing the singing. Dance. Sway. Move your arms. Have your face do different expressions. Lay down. Walk. All the things. Feel how useful your body can be and how good it can feel and how it can help the sound be more alive.
Warm Fuzzy Low Notes
If a singing warm up could be a warm cozy blanket of comfort, this is what it would sound like. Low notes and a vowel progression, as well as holding your own alongside a harmony all happen here.
What to focus on
1. Become familiar with it, and be kind to yourself. I suggest starting with the low part (the tune) and learning the harmony if want more. We have the same tune happening 3 times, each time moving to a different vowel. Knowing the structure like this can help you learn it.
2. One technical idea to focus on here is vowels. Here (as in the next warm up) we move through a progression of 3 vowels- Oo, Eh (air) and Ah. Each time, feel one steady mouth shape that doesn’t change while singing the one vowel. When you go higher, imagine more space inside, but lips and mouth shoudn’t change much.
Luxuriate Warm Up
Part comfort, part excitement. Here we sing through a tune and vowels, with a little call and response moment in the middle.
What to focus on
1. Become familiar with it, and be kind to yourself. Here again we have same phrase 3 times moving through different vowels and energies.
2. One technical idea to focus on here is the feeling of ever moving forward breath. Tumbling air that through all these long notes is always alive and constantly renewed. It can feel like an upside waterfall starting in your stomach, or it can feel like a beautiful singing vomit (your brain is good at remembering gross things).