I’d like to rave on endlessly about the glories of daily warm-ups. And right here’s where you start paying… in sweat!
Have you noticed how much better your voice operates when it’s been warmed up? Even if you don’t deliberately warm-up before a gig, by the middle of the second set, you may’ve noticed your voice feeling freer and more agile?
Let’s take the chance out of the equation. Even when we haven’t got a gig, we still need to warm-up the instrument. The same one we speak with continuously throughout the day! Athlete’s always stretch and train for events. We singers are no different. We are like vocal athletes.
Let’s not make life more difficult for ourselves. A little warm-up – if done correctly – can go a long way. Through it, we eradicate inconsistencies, get fit, increase range and agility, train our ears, smooth over any breaks in registers, get to know our voice – what it likes and doesn’t like, experiment with and practice the application of technique, strengthen and warm-up the muscles to avoid injury.
Everyday, the voice starts out its journey situated in the emotional minefield of the throat. Our job is to relocate the sound into the head and out of harms way. Our default setting is to sing and speak from the throat so relocating takes conscious effort.
Tension is often held in areas that we need to ‘open’ to resonate the sound in. It helps to stretch away these nasty tensions in the shoulders, neck, back, chest, throat, face and stomach in order to actively create space to amplify the sound. Some yoga stretches combined with long gentle low hums is a great way to start a vocal warm up.
Combining the phonic with the physical speeds up the process and makes us more ‘bodily aware’. Try combining the scales and arpeggios of a warm-up with gentle shoulder and arm swinging, housework or walking. Getting the whole body involved stops us getting too critical of the cracks and breaks the voice makes as it warms up. Be patient, compassionate, gentle and forgiving After all, guitarists have to tune up and saxophonists suck their reeds. As singers our whole body produces the sound – so let’s use it.
Walking outside provides low-level background noise (as does the sound of a shower) meaning that we use internal indicators of correct voice production instead of just using the ‘sound’ as a monitor. (e.g. feeling vibration in the forehead, registering the dissolution of tension) .
The initiation of sound, the ‘attack’ or ‘onset’ of the note dictates the success or failure of what we’re about to sing. If we can put the sound in the head with a ‘good onset’, then, as James Brown used to say, we ‘get off on the good foot’.
We do this by using an unvoiced ‘ng’.
Feel the cartilage in the nose vibrate when we sing words like ‘sing’, ‘ring’, ‘nong’. Ngaire, Ngaruawahia. The ‘ng’ is equivalent to the Fijian and Tongan ‘g’.
It helps to contrast a ‘good’ onset with the two throat-based ‘bad’ ones – ‘the breathy’ (sing ‘hah-hah’) Can you hear and feel how much air comes out before the sound? This onset is too soft – but seductively sexy. By contrast ‘the glottal’ (a Cockney accent’s glottal stop); a tight throated click instead of a ‘t’ as in war’a and Pee’a instead of water and Peter. Sing a tight throated ‘ah!-‘ah!-‘ah! Hear the ‘pop’ at the start of the sound? This is too hard – but seductively loud.
We use the ‘Ng’ to put every part of the range into the head thereby uniting the registers. We place and steer the sound by envisaging the ‘ng’ as a burning ring of fire in the third eye point in the forehead – above and between the eyes. We then jump the sound through it.
Sing ‘ngah-ngah’ and then sing ‘(ng)ah-(ng)ah’ by making the ng silent but configuring everything in your head as if you were about to say ng, then at the very last nanosecond – don’t! Remember the magic trick where there’s a vase of flowers on a table and the tablecloth is quickly pulled away leaving the vase in the same position? The tablecloth is the ‘ng’ and the vase is the ‘ah’.
Using ‘ng’ this way makes the onset of the note clean, precise and gentle. It sounds very much like a ‘deaf’ sound as deaf speakers don’t want to injure themselves by voicing sound from the throat. Ng is practiced on vowel words and syllables as the consonant will otherwise take the onset.
Warming up should be a gentle, gradual process starting in the midrange and slowly ascending semitone by semitone. Do not judge the sound as it comes out. Rather, allow this to be a grace period in which you get to trial the techniques like opening the throat with a silent giggle, ng, sucking breath inwards, openness and twang. The higher you sing, the more technique is required. How you do a warm-up is just as important as doing one.