Before exercising, you need to prepare yourself by warming up your muscles. Likewise if you want to practice vocals or sing on stage. Take time to warm up to keep your vocal cords healthy by doing some of the exercises and applying the techniques in this article. If you want to sing on stage, do a 10-minute warm-up several times a day to keep your vocal cords from getting tired and hurting. In addition to making a variety of sounds, warm up to work your lungs and relax your lips, tongue, and body so you're ready to sing.
Step
Part 1 of 3: Doing a Muscle Warmup
Step 1. Widen the throat cavity
The easiest and most effective way to practice warming up to get your body and throat ready before singing is to widen your throat cavity and stretch your diaphragm by yawning. Try to yawn by opening your mouth wide as if you are sleepy. To yawn, imagine you're yawning or watch a video of someone yawning to get yourself infected.
- Do this exercise 2-3 times to widen your throat cavity and stretch your diaphragm as best you can.
- You can widen your throat cavity with light exercise, such as doing jumping jacks or walking or jogging. After resting for a while, continue to warm up the vocal cords.
Step 2. Activate the core muscles
When singing, make sure you activate your abdominal muscles and produce sound using the right body parts. So that you can activate the muscles that will be used, make sounds like small coughs while figuring out which muscles to function because these muscles will be used when singing.
The core muscles consist of the psoas muscle, pelvic floor, diaphragm, and other muscles. You can produce a loud, rounded voice if you activate your core muscles when you sing
Step 3. Relax your neck and shoulders
You can sing well when your body is relaxed. Thus, there are no tense muscles when singing high notes. To relax your upper body, rotate your shoulders from back to front, hold for 5 seconds in a slightly bent position, then relax. Do this movement 4-5 times.
- Make sure you produce sound using your diaphragm. Many people try to hit high notes using their neck muscles instead of activating their abs.
- Avoid this by relaxing your neck and shoulders while practicing your voice warm-up, especially if you want to sing high notes.
Step 4. Do breathing exercises
You need to practice your breath in order to sing well because breathing is the body's mechanism for producing sound. For that, do the following 2 exercises.
- While relaxing your shoulders and chest, take deep breaths until your diaphragm is stretched so that your stomach expands slightly. Then, take a deep breath starting by slowly deflating your stomach and relaxing your diaphragm. Repeat this exercise for 2 minutes.
- Inhale in the same way, but as you exhale, blow air through your clenched teeth so that you hear a hissing sound. Repeat this exercise for 1 minute.
Step 5. Relieve the tension in the jaw
Before singing, relax your jaw and mouth muscles because tension in these areas affects the quality of your voice. Perform the following steps to relax the jaw muscles.
- Place both palms on your cheeks and open your mouth without forcing yourself.
- Gently massage the jaw and face muscles for 1-2 minutes.
Part 2 of 3: Doing Voice Warm Up Exercises
Step 1. Hum
Start the practice by making an uninterrupted "hmmm" sound in a low tone in your throat while closing your lips and exhaling as long as you can. Do this exercise for 5-10 breaths. Then, repeat this step for 5-10 breaths while opening your mouth and making a "haaah" sound as long as you can.
Humming is an effective way of warming up your voice to relax your throat, face, neck and shoulders while controlling your breath
Step 2. Hum the do-re-mi
After practicing your warm-up by humming according to the steps above, hum your do-re-mi in an ascending and descending scale so that you can practice warming up your voice with varying notes. Start humming from the lowest note in your vocal range and then work your way up note by note until it's quite high and repeat from the beginning.
Do this exercise 4-5 notes higher and then lower one by one with the same basic note
Step 3. Do a lip trill
This exercise, commonly known as lip smacking or pursing, is performed by vibrating and flexing the lips to relax the vocal cords. To do a lip trill, pinch your lips together, open them slightly, and then blow air through your lip gap (thinking of a motor or the buzzing of a bee). Do this exercise 2 breaths round and then repeat 3-4 more times while moving your head left and right.
Do the lip trill again while moving your head, but this time make a "b" sound from the cleft lip in a scale starting from high to low and then up again
Step 4. Make the siren sound
Say "ng" inside your nose like you're ringing the last 2 letters of the word "yang". Keep this sound out with 3-5 basic notes. Each time you change the base note, say the "ng" higher and lower down to the starting note according to the vocal range.
This step helps the singer to gradually warm up the vocal cords so that the vocal cords are stretched little by little so that he or she can make the transition between the head voice and the chest voice by creating air resonance in certain parts of the body while producing different sounds due to pitch changes
Step 5. Do some tongue-twisting by saying a few sentences while changing the base note
This exercise is helpful in improving articulation and flexing the vocal cords when spoken while changing the volume and pitch of the voice. For that, say the following sentence:
- Seli between the sides of buying soto in the afternoon
- Cat bites top
- Peter is smart to carry puter puter packages
- Strikingly unique
- Clink clang delik seconds
- Snake coiled on the fence
- Powdered bobok duck
- Red orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet
Part 3 of 3: Practice with Advanced Techniques
Step 1. Make a long note
Sometimes, you have to make a long sound when you sing certain notes. Singers who are not ready to do it or have not mastered the correct technique are not able to sound the notes according to the score of the song. Therefore, practice according to the following instructions.
- Pull the ribs to the sides, activate the lower abdominal muscles, relax the shoulders and neck.
- Inhale slowly as you expand your throat, extend your arms, and expand your chest as if you were just taken aback. Maintain this condition while relaxing the body. This technique is also used when singing long notes.
- Pick a note in the middle of your vocal range and do the steps above, but this time, sing the notes as long as you can while widening and relaxing your throat cavity.
Step 2. Strive for high notes
There are several ways to practice singing a high-pitched song. However, high notes can damage your vocal cords if you push yourself to reach them. Therefore, apply the following guidelines so that you can achieve high notes without damaging your vocal cords.
- Learn to regulate the airflow to keep it steady while singing.
- Relax all muscles.
- When singing, try to keep the body parts to create resonance (throat, mouth, nose, chest, etc.) still form a cavity.
- Choose a song that is high in pitch and practice part by part until you can comfortably sing the entire song.
- Practice singing the song once without saying the lyrics. Choose a specific alphabet or syllable to say when singing. If you can sing comfortably, sing a song with lyrics from start to finish.
Step 3. Try to hit a low note
Songs that are low in pitch are also difficult to master because the vocal cords relax as the pitch drops, making it difficult for you to control your voice.
- So that you can control your voice when singing low notes, make it a habit to widen your throat cavity and maintain resonance in your face.
- If you don't feel resonance in your face when singing low notes, move your head left to right to widen your throat, then try again.
- Low notes cannot be sung out loud. So, don't worry if the volume decreases when you sing a low note. Instead of focusing on the volume of your voice, try to sing low notes in a precise and rounded voice.
