warmup

You’ve got a great piece to perform.  You’ve made a great plan.  You have rehearsed it to a professional standard.  Then you get on stage, and it just doesn’t come off because your voice wasn’t in good shape, or your body was full of tension, or you were in the wrong state of mind.  What a waste!  And the tragedy is that it would have been easy to prevent.  You need a reliable routine to get your voice, your body and your mind into the right space for a peak performance.  That's what we're going to learn in this mini-series on how to prepare for the stage.

Let's start with the voice.  A clear and responsive voice is critical not only to singers, but to actors and speakers as well.  The human perceptions are very adept at detecting "issues" in other people by the way that they sound.  The sound of your voice is a "deep measure" of your health, and it's easy to prove this to yourself.  Just a few seconds of listening to someone vocalize and you can tell whether they are sick, how much energy they have, and even a lot about their mood, psychology and physiology.  That may be why we developed the capacity to sing, as a species - singing lets us demonstrate our fitness to a lot of potential mates all at once.  (I'm thinking here of prehistoric rituals, not groupies... uh, let's move on.)

Cutting to the chase, a clear and responsive voice is a voice that is free of tension.  Tension in your voice degrades everything about it - your range, your quality, your vocal agility, your dynamic range, everthing.  So finding a tension-free way of using your voice is critical to your success as a performer.

If you notice that your breaths are noisy or forced, those breaths are introducing tension into your voice.  A silent, effortless breath will have the opposite effect, relaxing the voice and resetting it for another phrase of speech or music.  Often times as performers we try to make the breath as short as possible, fearing that it is interrupting the music or the speech.  That fear, together with the fear of not having enough breath for the next phrase, leads us to force the inhalation, and as a result we accumulate more and more tension in the voice as the performance goes on.  Quality degrades, and stamina becomes an issue.  Also this infuses the performance with a sense of panic (which probably isn’t appropriate for every scene.)  Don’t fear the breath – think of each one as a part of the phrase, not an interruption.  Take the necessary time to breathe well.

Now here’s the exercise that I learned from my multi-talented sister Donya, which is very simple and quick.  I am told that it comes from the popular Linklater method of vocal instruction.  I’ll confirm this for you when I read the Linklater book, “freeing the natural voice.”

Exercise to reconnect with your natural voice

In order to reconnect with your natural voice, you can follow these steps in your backstage routine:

1. Lie on the floor and make yourself relaxed and comfortable
2. Exhale completely, and then simply wait for your body to inhale, which it must do.  Do not inhale on purpose, but allow it to happen.  Do this three times to become comfortable with the ease of it.  All of your inhalations in this exercise should be as effortless as this.
3. Take a deep and effortless breath, and exhale without effort, but catch the breath at the lips with a light “ffff” sound.  Notice the effect of this secondary resistance.  Repeat three times.
4. Take a deep and effortless breath, and exhale this time through a “vvvv” sound.  Notice how the vibrations resonate in the spaces of your head, mouth, throat and chest.  Repeat three times.
5. Continuing the “vvvv” exercise, open up the “vvvv” into an “ah” vowel, and notice how the freedom of this tone gives it clarity.

You can use this exercise to “reset” and reconnect with your natural voice at any time.  Many singers perform this exercise at the beginning of every vocal session, to make sure that they are also rehearsing with their most tension-free instrument.

In the next article we’ll deal with freeing and relaxing the body.

So, you want to know how exactly you can start integrating the left and right brain into your rehearsals.  I know, I know, you think it is impossible - I get that.  I know how it feels to try to keep your mind on the technical while also feeling all those emotions and keeping the story spinning.

First off, may I just put a caveat in here?  If you are a very beginner singer, and are just learning how to breathe, this may not be a topic you are ready to broach yet, and that's ok! I think that sometimes we get so attached to the road to perfection/excellence, that we miss a bit of the journey along the way.  Wherever you are in your musical journey is wonderful!  In the very beginning you are putting so much energy and thought into retraining your very muscles which have been spending the last however-number of decades focusing on speech and breathing, that there hardly seems to be much room for thinking about the music you are singing!  In fact, just keeping it in your mind to breathe in freely, or to relax your jaw can use up every brain cell you have!  Totally cool, and be happy with where you are.

Assuming you are past the basics now, and no longer have to concentrate on the mechanics of singing, let's talk about how to develop some new skills that will bring both your own musical experience to the emotional brink as well as that of your audience.  It starts with the vocal warmup, and today's article focuses on that very first thing we do as singers - how do we start this process of 'engagement' when we are doing the most technique-laden exercises of the day?  I mean, aren't vocal exercises specifically designed to exercise the voice, and be 'run through'?

Well, let's reframe this thought.  First of all, why do we do vocal exercises?  Believe it or not, I would say that the majority of the singers with whom I work do NOT work their voices regularly in a vocal warmup or exercise.  In fact, the majority of them probably only do vocal warmups inside the group that they sing with once a week, and for the rest of the week, it's out of sight, out of mind.  Here's a reminder of some of what vocal exercises enable us to improve upon/do for the voice (and thus the argument of why we should make them a part of our every day routine).  Vocal exercises:

• warm-up the voice before singing (relax the voice/larynx/vocal apparatus)
• develop vocal flexibility in range (i.e. help you go higher and lower in your range)
• increase accuracy and agility (help you move between intervals accurately and efficiently)
• develop breath control and strength (improve your ability to make it through long phrases and/or achieve intricate dynamic plans)
• focus the mind on singing
• practice difficult passages or skillsets in an isolated exercise, in order to perfect technique

Ok, so you know why warming up is good, and now you do it all the time.  How effective are you?  How closely does it mirror the stage experience for you?  I can say without exaggeration that the majority of singers I work with who DO their warmsups simply 'run through' them in a methodical way - reminiscent of chopping carrots on a cutting board.  However, the first level of excellence in a vocal warmup begins with each repetition outperforming the last.  In other words as you sing an exercise, be aware of what you can improve upon and as you go make adjustments that improve your result.   What would happen if you truly attended to your vocal exercises?  Let me paint a picture:

Option A:

Run through the following vocal warmup on an "aaah" :

1   3   5   8   5   3   1 (an arpeggio)

Were you vocally excellent?  Did you tune every note perfectly?  Was it well-supported throughout, with no obvious shifts through your register?  What was your experience?  Was it earth moving?  Was it grand?  Was it a little boring?

If you said a little boring, or even just 'nothing', I think that you might want to experiment with a little bit of conscious attention to the exercise.  Try this on:

Option B:

Before singing, close your eyes (ok, you might have to read this through before you actually attempt the exercise!).  With your body relaxed and easy, breathe in through your nostrils.  While you breathe, take a moment and sense exactly what parts of your body move as you breathe.  What sensations to you feel?  Do you feel your abdomen move as your viscera move out of the way of your diaghram?  Was there tension or tightness anywhere specific?  Did you notice the breath getting 'caught' anywhere?

Now, breathe in through your nose, and visualize your brand new baby sleeping in her crib.. you are going to sing her a gentle lullabye - sing your arpeggio.. what did you notice?  What new sensations occured?  Did your vocal texture or colour change? If you sang like that forever, what would you expect?

Breathe in again through your nose, and this time picture yourself as Pavarotti, commanding the stage.  Your passion is breathtaking - sing the arpeggio.  What changed this time?  What did you notice?  What new sensations occured?  Again, if you sang like that forever, what would you expect?

Lastly, breathe in through your nose, and this time, play with the arpeggio naturally - allow the beauty of those particular tones to shine through as you sing - get out of the way of them so they can shine through.. Do it a few times.  What do you notice??

Sometimes we wait for a coach to come in and 'save us' and tell us how to 'fix' our voices.  How often to we really attend to our voices ourselves though, and really feel what we are doing?  I think a lot of answers are within us as we sing - we just need to listen to and feel ourselves long enough to identify with our own voices!

Feel free to experiment with all your different vocal textures and colours - attend to your voice as you experiment - what hurts? What feels good?  What does it sound like?  What types of songs might you allow that voice to shine through in?  The most important concept here is that you take away the fear of not sounding 'perfect', and you allow yourself vocal play time, to just experiment!  While you do this, pay attention to what's going on in your voice - is it sustainable?  Is it healthy?  Is it pleasant?

Now, as you sing this exercise, build emotions around it.  Not stories, but emotions.  Try on moving only the emotions at a visceral level, and see how it affects your voice.  How do you feel when you sing that way?  Is it more rewarding?

As you work this at home, keep in mind that this is all experimental time, and that you are not only playing with the technique in your voice (the tuning, accuracy, freedom, etc), but also with the emotion - try to work both at once - if this is really hard for you, try working just your vocal technique a few times, until you feel you have made progress, then add some emotion to it, and work it until you feel you have made progress.  Go back and forth until you feel that you have a firm grasp of both concepts at the same time.

Good luck, and happy experimenting!