Singing and vocal warmup exercises are co-joined twins. If you are concerned about maintaining a healthy voice, then you must give yourself to these four best warmup exercises. These warmup exercises will change your voice forever.

The quest for singing better and maintaining a healthy voice can be a lot demanding for singers. This is worse when it comes to vocal exercises. What type of vocal exercises to do? Do you do them correctly? When is it proper to do them etc can be a major challenge. May I tell you that a lot of singers have over time lost their one time beautiful voice due to wrong vocal exercises and techniques.

Well, my mission today is to save you from becoming one of such. I will be sharing four simple but under-rated vocal exercises that works wonders on your voice and can as well change your voice forever.

Four Vocal Warmup Exercises

Exercise 1 – Lip Trill (Lip Roll)

The lip roll, in my opinion, is probably the most under-rated warmup exercise yet one of the most brilliant singing exercises ever discovered. The lip trill helps to eliminate vocal tension and strains. It equally helps to relax the singer’s muscles – The inner larynx muscle; this is done by completely disengaging the outer larynx muscle (used for swallowing and food NOT for signing). This makes singing effortless.

HOW TO USE THE LIP TRILL

Here is an example of the how to do the lip roll.

When practicing the lip trill, your lips are involved. It is the vibration of your pair of lips together with the help of the breathing muscles. This helps your vocal cords to make more advanced vocal co-ordinations.

To get better results, try not to push your voice or sound as this will cause some strain or tensions in the muscle around the voice box; that’s definitely what you don’t need.

Why Do Lip Trill?

It is simple, consistent practice of the lip trill exercise will;
1. Increase your vocal range
2. Smoothen out the bridges between lower and upper ranges
3. Help you with consistency in note production

Exercise 2 – The Tongue Trill

The tongue trill has many of the same benefits as the lip trill but can be a lot more difficult to do. With patience and good techniques, this can be achieved. The tongue trill is basically the same as rolling your R’s.

This is another brilliant exercise that every singer should have in their toolbox. It can greatly help to improve on your singing. If a singer can do this exercise well, then it is a great sign of excellent technique; but if your voice is riddled with bad technique, it is difficult to perform.

One of the most important thing you need to avoid when doing this exercise and singing generally is tension. Another is, dropping of the swallowing muscles( muscle beneath the jaw). These will affect the sound production and make the exercise difficult to do.

Place your thumb under your jaw, you will feel the swallowing muscle there, your hands should be placed their throughout the exercise as this will enable you practice without the muscle tensing up.

WHY DO THE TONGUE TRILL?

Doing this correctly will free up your voice and give you
. Better tone quality
. More vocal range
. More freedom in your voice
. You will easily be able to use different stylistic things like vibrato, licks, trills etc..

Exercise 3 – Humming

Humming is a great vocal warm up exercise probably my best because, it can be done almost anywhere and anytime. This is also because it is quieter and does not project like other open mouth exercises with the tone emerging from the nasal passage and not the mouth.

It has been said that humming activates both sides of the brain – wonderful!! Maybe true, but more research needs to be done. A certainty however, is that humming is a wonderful feeling. It is a way of gently but firmly activating the vocal cords while feeling forward resonance in the face.

Humming should never be forced, it should be as effortless as a the lip trill.

If you need a really fast warmup before a performance, then go for Humming. This exercise helps a lot with your tone quality and vocal health. This is because, it trains you to make really clean and correct sound.

Exercise 4 – Nay Nay Vocal exercise

This is another brilliant exercise I love so much cause it helps to activate the cords.

This exercise helps to achieve cord closure in your head voice. It encourages release and mixture in the voice. They sound whiny, ugly and nasally in order to be effective. This excessively whiny sounds keeps the vocal cords together. This is done through the bridge/break by thinning out the chest voice to meet the head voice.

The goals of this exercises is to improve on your singing voice. So, no matter what level of singing you are at the moment doing this exercises at least 20 to 40 minutes a day will give a wonderful improvement of your voice in a few weeks.

Here are the four vocal exercises in this clip

So, go ahead and do them. Let me know how effective these four vocal warmup exercises has helped to shape your voice. Leave a comment below!

Chacha Vocals

Vocalist | Instrumentalist | Contemporary Singer | Classical Singer | Musicpreneur