Want to increase your opportunities as a voice over artist by improving your vocal range? If so, you have come to the right place. The main way to improve your vocal range is like any physical endeavor: practice. We recommend doing around 30-minutes of vocal warm ups every day. If you do this, both the range of your voice – your ability to hit high and low notes – will lengthen and your diction, breath, and range of sound will also improve.
For a 30-minute warm up, we recommend incorporating five key elements:
1) A breathing exercise
2) A gentle warm up, such as humming
3) An enunciation exercise, where you start to enunciate syllables
4) An articulation exercise, where you say complicated tongue twisters
5) A singing warm up, where you sing scales to lengthen your range
If you’re in a pinch before a gig and only have two minutes to warm up, we suggest humming.
It’s an easy, extremely effective way to relax your voice. Humming vocal scales can be a particularly effective quick warm up.
Without further ado, here’s a detailed explanation of each key step of a 30-minute warm-up with written exercises and video tutorials.
1. Breathing Exercises
Before you begin practicing your breath, loosen out your body a bit so that you feel relaxed, alert, and connected to your breath. This short video from the National Theatre in London is a wonderful tutorial, first showing body stretches and then breathing exercises that their professional actors execute when they warm up their vocal chords.
First, start by stretching your arms and legs. Then, stand tall, stretching your hands toward the sky. Look up. Feel free to stand on the tip of your toes. Then, flop down gracefully with your head below your shoulders, bent over, looking toward the ground. Slowly, roll back up to a standing position, with your neck coming up last. Pay attention as you roll up each vertebra one at a time, keeping your breath in mind as you roll up. Finish in a relaxed, standing position.
Now, begin by inhaling deeply, and then exhaling deeply. See how long you can hold your breath and exhale for. For example, start with a three-count. As you become more comfortable, increase your counts to four-counts, five-counts, etc.
One great way to increase your breath and diaphragm muscles is to breathe out and say an “sss” sound as you exhale. The National Theatre video portrays this clearly. If you start feeling dizzy or light-headed from the breathing exercises, sit down, drink some water, and take a break. Be careful throughout the vocal warm-ups to not exhaust yourself. This is a marathon, not a race.
2. Humming
Humming is a fantastic way to warm up, and something we especially recommend doing toward the beginning of your vocal practice. In this less than two-minute video, professional vocal coach Cheryl Moore Brinkley explains why humming is the best way to warm-up your voice for speaking, and gives a few examples of humming exercises towards the end. Cari Cole, a celebrity vocal coach for the likes of Steely Dan and Courtney Love, explains in this video how a quick vocal humming warm up is the best thing singers can do if they need to quickly warm up before performing.
The reason that humming is especially good for the vocal chords is it doesn’t strain your voice: you can hum while singing scales and be at less risk of straining yourself. It clears your throat and takes less energy than speaking or singing. So whether you’re warming your voice up in the morning as part of your daily routine or needing to get ready quickly before a gig, we always recommend including some form of humming in your vocal warm up!
For a speaking humming exercise, first keep your lips together and teeth apart and hum from your lips, not your nose. You can start by simply saying “mmm” and thinking about something tasty while you do it to get you in the mood. Now, say “mmm” up and down your speaking pitch scales, from low to high notes and high to low notes.
For a singing humming exercise, keep the same physical posture, but simply sing while you hum. You can start with any assortment of scales you desire: going up and down major and minor scales, singing thirds, fifths, octaves, etc.
3. Enunciation
Now that your vocal chords are a bit warmed up, let’s start working on your diction, or your ability to speak words clearly. First, we suggest doing simple enunciation exercises to get your jaw relaxed.
Try pronouncing the following syllables and vowels to get you started:
- PTKT, or “puh-tuh-kuh-tuh.”
- WEWA, or “wee-wah.”
- BDGD, or “buh-duh-guh-duh.”
- Rolling your r’s. If you can’t roll your r’s, try buzzing your lips.
4. Articulation
Articulation exercises focus on “tongue twisters” or difficult sentences that require focus to express clearly. Ever heard of sentences like “Sally sells sea shells by the sea shore?” That’s a classic tongue twister.
Both of these videos give great examples of tongue twisters.
Here’s another tongue twister classic:
“Oh what to do to die, today, at a minute or two till 2.
A thing distinctly hard to say, yet harder still to do.
For they’ll beat a tattoo, at twenty to two
With a rattatta tattatta tattatta too
And the dragon will come, when he hears the drum
At a minute or two, till two today
At a minute or two till two.”
5. Singing warm up
Now that your voice is relaxed and your jaw has practiced some tongue twisters, it’s time to get to what you’re likely most motivated to improve: your vocal range. If you are singing professionally and have never studied with a vocal coach, we recommend seeing one at least a few times to make sure that your vocal warm-ups will not hurt your voice. It’s very easy to strain your voice while singing, especially as you switch between chest voice for lower notes and head voice for higher notes.
It’s essential that you’re not only warming up your voice in a healthy way, but that you’re also preserving your voice throughout your day. Drink fluids such as water frequently. If you live in cold climates during the winter, try to keep your neck covered with a scarf as much as possible. These preventative measures will also help decrease the risk of hurting your voice.
To teach popular singing warm-up exercises, the written word simply does not do it justice. Check out this video (also referenced in our humming section), or this one to get a general sense of simple, basic singing warm ups.
Hopefully now you should feel better prepared to work as a voice over artist, and with time, improve your range!
What vocal warm-up exercises do you practice? Share your tips with us in the comments below.
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