Hail! Denizens of the internet!
Today’s post is
centred around, as the title states, warm ups and starting rituals. Are they
really necessary? I’ve met vocalists who go straight up on stage, no
preparation whatsoever and just scream their hearts out. And by contrast, I
know people who have painstakingly detailed ways of warming up that they never
deviate from. The purpose of this post is to run you through a number of
different warm ups that some people swear by so that you can try them out, as
well as give a bit more thought as to what warm ups do to your throat and the
purpose behind what I call ‘start up rituals’.
A quick definition I lifted from google tells us that a warm
up can be understood as “exercising in preparation for strenuous activity” (wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn).
This quick definition fits vocal performance as well as it does mundane exercise,
given that the Vocal Chords are in fact muscles. Your throat creates all the
different sounds that it can emit by vibrating the two ‘vocal folds’ contained
within your larynx together (for the moment we’ll completely ignore use of the
false chords), with different frequencies of vibration creating different pitches
of sound. Hence, by warming up you allow the vocal folds to warm up and they’ll
react a lot differently to if you hadn’t warmed them up.
While warming up isn’t always strictly necessary (oftentimes
you’ll find yourself in a situation where you don’t have time for whatever
reason, and it’s not the end of the world if you don’t), but it can make a
massive amount of difference to your throat’s stamina, ability to create tones,
the overall range of your voice and the amount of control you have over your
throat. In general vocal performance becomes a million times easier having done
a warm up. The only situation where I wouldn’t warm up would be if I were
trying to replicate a vocalist’s tone who clearly didn’t warm up before hand,
or had a fairly throaty and simple tone e.g. Abbath from Immortal, or numerous
other prominent black metal vocalists.
But what warm ups can you do? I’ll describe 7 different types of specific warm up I’ve tried and experiment with over the years, giving an overview of the technique and my opinion on its effectiveness, and any interesting points about that respective warm up.
1)Traditional singing warm up – ‘do re mi fa so lah te do’
Pick a note, any old note (for the non-musical amongst you,
just pick a low deep kind of a tone), then sing that note on ‘do’, slowly by
increments of a tone (for non-musicians, any small increment will do) singing
each word with each note as you go up. You can also do this in growls and
screams, but I wouldn’t advise it without being warmed up first.
I use this technique all the time as a standard initial warm
up, and as it can take you through your entire dynamic range, I don’t really
see any particular weakness with this warm up, apart from maybe the weird looks
you get in a venue growling along to a Julie Andrews song. I mean seriously.
2)Melissa Cross Approach
In her ‘Zen of Screaming’ DVD, Cross takes you through about
14 different warm up exercises and different students performing them all in
their own respective vocal range in a clean tone. Her exercises invariably have
you making strange noises (e.g Mee- gee monkeys, Wee-ee Wee-ee Wee-ee Wee’s and
trying to replicate the sound of a French doorbell) up and down a scale, much
like the ‘do re mi’ exercise detailed above.
Having tried the exercises, I don’t really find them useful
at all. They barely even warmed up my throat from the cold street I had just
come in off. While many famous and, in some cases, quite talented vocalists
swear by her warm ups and take her word as gospel, I don’t. You can get the
desired effects of this warm up by doing the ‘do re mi’ exercise, and look like
a LOT less of an idiot than if you walking around saying “mee- gee, mee- gee”
in different pitches for half an hour. By all means get the DVD and try them
out yourself if interested, but these exercises proved entirely worthless (and
on one occasion actually detrimental) to my vocal ability.
3)The Pitched Shout Exercise
This warm up is based around pitched shouting. You start off
with a pitched shout at a normal speaking volume, and repeat it five times.
Then increase your volume by a small increment and repeat five times. Repeat
this process going from your normal speaking level of volume through to as loud
as you can go while keeping the shout at a constant pitch. Repeat the entire
process of going from normal levels to your loudest pitched shout three times.
More if it’s a cold day, or you feel you really need to get particularly warmed
up.
This exercise is great for initially warming up your throat
in a hurry, because it’s quick and efficient. It also requires sustained effort
from your vocal chords and in general is a really easy one to remember and use.
Personally I use the word “hey” just to try and not look/sound too weird when
sitting backstage singing to myself, but it can work with anything. The only
downside of this exercise is it only deals with volume, not with dynamic range,
but as long as you do it along with other exercises in order to cover warming
up your throat fully, it’s an amazingly useful little warm up.
4)Singing clean pitches of what you would when growling
An alternative to the ‘do re mi’ exercise is just singing
through the songs you’re going to sing in a clean tone, making sure to include
all the changes in dynamic range and timing in the song, rather than growling
them.
While not wholly as effective, it can be useful in a limited
sort of way. One positive of this warm up is it embeds the vocal structures of
songs in your mind, and they’re easy to forget when you’re zipping about the
stage from right to left, headbanging like a maniac and trying your best not to
trip up over the bass drum mic or crash into your guitarist. Hell, I do this
exercise for that very reason alone a lot of the time.
5)Extremes of the range of your throat
This isn’t really a structured exercise, but I do utilise it
when warming up. Basically the two ends of your vocal range area really deep ‘ee’
drone sound at the bottom and a silly high falsetto at the other end. Basically,
I just play around with saying different things or singing along with songs
exclusively in these ranges. The resulting sounds are usually something
resembling Mongolian Throat singing (look it up, it’s awesome!) or King
Diamond/3 Inches Of Blood like vocals, which are hilariously off key when I
sing them, but as long as I’m using that range it serves it’s purpose of
warming my throat up.
6)Humming
Just humming for a sustained period of five minutes or so is
an excellent vocal warm up, as humming is created by making the vocal folds
vibrate together really quickly and this, unsurprisingly, warms them up a good
deal. Don’t stick to humming one thing, hum sustained notes, hum melodies- do
whatever. Variety is the spice of life after all, and also helps you get that
little bit closer to your full dynamic range.
7)Growling along with things
Last but not least, simply growling along with things is a
good finishing warm up. Whether blasting through ‘Pursuit of Vikings’ or
singing one of my own songs, it lets me know whether the warm ups I’ve done so
far have been effective or not, and whether I need to continue warming up or not.
It’s usually best to do something slow to mid paced, like the afore mentioned
Amon Amarth song, as you’re testing out whether the other warm ups have been
effective or not. It can also be a good chance to recap on songs you’re not
totally confident with before a show.
While the warm ups detailed above are the main ones I know
that me, or people I know, use a lot, they’re by no means the only ones out
there for you to find and try out! Hell, even talking with a mate for half an
hour can be a good way of warming up. I find that if I rush out of the house to
a practice straight out of bed, and without having spoken with anyone, my voice
is about 3 times as hard to warm up because it hasn’t been used at all
beforehand (also, for this reason doing vocals in the evening time is usually
easier and more comfortable because you’ve been doing indirect warm ups all day
long! If forced to perform in the morning/afternoon, take special care to make
sure you’ve warmed up adequately).
Thus far I haven’t mentioned what I call ‘start up rituals’.
A start up ritual is something you do before every show in order to get into a
certain frame of mind, as well as warming yourself up for the impending
performance. Anything can be incorporated into it, from specialised warm ups
and physical exercises to touching your lucky rabbit’s foot or invoking Cthulhu
to finally make his long awaited entrance onto this pitiful material plane. The
purpose of it isn’t wholly to get warmed up or in a frame of mind, it’s kind of
both, and fairly hard to convey the purpose of. I have my own start up rituals
that some of you will know, and others won’t, but I’m not going to share them.
Discover what works for you to get you pumped before a show, or puts you in
that truly fabulous, or serial killer mind set.
And that, dear readers, is as close to a basic guide to
warming up as I think I can write.
-E
Tomorrow’s post: Breathing, and why it’s not just a thing
you do to keep living.
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