Warming up before a vocal performance or practice time is so, so important. Spending time in a singing warmup protects you from hurting your vocal muscles when trying to hit hard notes. It helps you stay relaxed so you don’t fall back into strain during your singing. It builds muscle memory for good posture and engagement, so that you don’t have to consciously think about it as much while singing.
If you have 30 minutes to warm up, definitely do it! But realistically, you might not have that time available. When you’re in a time crunch, try these exercises to get you warm and relaxed as quickly as possible.
Spend about a minute and a half in each of these exercises. Start with low volume and gradually add power as you feel your singing getting easier. You’ll be on your way to a warm and relaxed voice! If you don’t feel warmed up at the end of the 10 minutes, or if you feel like you need to spend more time in any of the exercises below, please take the extra time your voice is asking for! Pretty much every time I’ve strained my voice, it’s because I haven’t spent enough time properly warming up.
For each of these exercises, remember to stand or sit with good posture and head position. Focus on maintaining a totally relaxed face and throat. I like to call it “zombie face.” You’ll obviously want to use facial expressions when singing for others, but practicing vocal tone and expression with a fully relaxed face means you get to use your face to convey emotion and add to your performance rather than using it to control your tone.
I can’t stress enough — every single exercise should be done with complete relaxation. If that means the “high end” of your range is an octave lower than usual, that’s fine! You don’t start warming up for a run with all-out sprints. Don’t start out your singing by trying to blast your highest and loudest notes either.
You might want to spend some more time in one or two of these exercise and leave out a few. This is a menu of options rather than a strict regimen. Do the exercises that make your voice feel good! If you’re straining or feel tension in your neck, reset your posture and try again toward the middle of your range. If you’re still tense, try a different exercise. Warming up to sing should feel good!
Humming
I like to start my warm ups with a little humming. Keeping your mouth closed helps control your volume and keep you from going too hard too fast.
Start in the center of your vocal range and work up and down your range in 5-note scales. No need to go to your absolute highest and lowest notes right now. Work on your agility within a comfortable range.
Sighs
Staying in a hum, start on a high note and sigh/glide down to a lower one. Ideally this should move from your head voice into your chest voice, through your vocal “break.” If that’s not accessible in the moment, don’t worry about it! Just go from comfortably high to comfortably low. It should sound like you just smelled something delicious.
After spending some time in a hummed sigh, move to an open-mouth sigh with the vowel sound “ah.” Continue moving from a high note to a low note. Start your sigh a little higher than before, and move down to a lower note.
This is one that I often incorporate throughout my day — in addition to during formal warm ups. Having some coffee in the morning? I’m hum sighing. In a virtual meeting on mute? Hum sigh. Walking my dog? Sighing. It is super useful to keep my voice warm when I’m not actively singing.
Lip trill sirens
You might also have heard these referred to as raspberries or bubbles. These are my absolute favorite powerhouse of a warm up. It forces your face to relax while you run your voice through its range. It also makes you aware of how much air you’re using. To hold a note and trill your lips at the same time, you must engage your diaphragm without tensing up in your neck and face.
Start in about the same range as your hum sighs, trilling high to low. As you start to feel your voice warm up, you can start singing closer to your range edges.
Vowel glides over broken chords
In this exercise, you’ll say “oo-ee-oo-ee-oo” up and down over major chord triads. For example, in a C chord:
- Start on C with “oo”
- Jump to the E with the “ee” sound
- Move to G on the next “oo”
- Back down to E on “ee”
- Back to C for the last “oo”
Avoid sliding up or down from one note to the next. Each time you change a vowel sound, it should start on the desired note.
Begin this exercise somewhere near the lower comfortable end of your range, and move up by a half step after each triad. Stop when you approach the upper end of your range. If you have time, you can move back down the scale.
Keep your face relaxed and use just your tongue and throat to form these vowels. Make extra space in your soft palate. For an added challenge, over-exaggerate an “O” shape with your lips — and don’t change your mouth shape even when you move to the “ee” sound.
There are tons of other vowel-focused warm ups out there. If you have one that you like more than this one, feel free to sub it in!
Staccato laughing intervals
This one is a great exercise to get you feeling your breath support! With the same chord triad notes as the vowel glide exercise, you’ll instead sing a free, engaged, staccato “HA!” or “HO!” Channel your inner Santa or evil overlord (whichever feels right to you, or perhaps a blend of both).
Place one hand on your stomach above your belly button, below your sternum. Before trying notes, just give an easy “HA! HA! HA!” Did you feel your hand moving each time? If not, you can even press in with your fingertips on the soft part of your stomach, just below the bottom of your sternum. You should be able to see your hand move with each “HA!”
You don’t need to run the whole gambit of your range with this exercise. Starting near the middle-bottom of your comfortable range, move up the scale until you’re near the comfortable high end. Don’t worry about going super high right now. You’re just getting your diaphragm to work with your vocal cords as a single powerful unit.
Tongue twisters over scales
Now that your voice is more warmed up, cap off with some tongue twisters. These warm up your tongue and help with pronunciation agility. Pretty much any tongue twister phrase you can sing on a single note will do!
Start the tongue twister on a note near the middle of your range and sing a phrase of it on a single note. Move up the scale, singing a single phrase on one note each time.
Really over-pronounce each vowel and consonant.
Some of my favorite tongue twisters:
- Red lorry, yellow leather
- A proper copper coffee pot
- Chester Cheetah chews a chunk of cheap cheddar cheese
Get ready to rock and roll!
You’ve just warmed up! Do you feel ready to sing? Check in with your voice and how your body feels. Do you feel tension anywhere? What kinds of thoughts are you having? Your mind is one of the most powerful tools in your vocal toolkit. If you can envision yourself relaxing and singing with ease and joy, you can also sing that way!
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