1. Hum like crazy! Hum up and down scales to gently loosen up your vocal cords. Humming is one of the easiest ways to clear any excess mucus from the throat and prepare your voice to sing fully.
2. Do lip rolls. Lip rolls are easy exercises that gently massage your vocal cords.
3. Do “mums”. “Mums” lower your larynx and helps your voice resist strain when warming up.

These quick little tips can be done anywhere at any time. While I would certainly recommend you having a fuller warm up, better some type of warm up than none at all!

What kind of warm ups do you do when you are rushed or in a hurry?

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1. The Vocal Warm Up Is Absolutely Necessary
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3. Guest Post at Quick Online Tips

How To Sing Vibrato

1. One of the best ways to learn how to sing vibrato is to use the art of imitation. I cannot stress to you enough how important it is for you to imitate other singers in order to grow your abilities. Your own style will come from a variation of other styles that you pick up on and implement into your singing habits. This is why it is important that you find good singers with good technique to imitate. Vibrato can be learned, but you have to work at it. The easiest way (in my own opinion) is to go about imitating people and not really thinking much about vibrato. You will have one of those ‘ah ha’ moments with your vibrato and wonder when you practiced it at all. Oh the joys of imitation! If you wanted someone to imitate, try Chris Daughtry. His vibrato is very fast but it is extremely easy to notice. Listen to some of his songs and try to imitate the vibrato that he is making. You will obviously be a lot slower than him when you start, but practice and endurance will pay off.

2. Remember that vibrato is simply an oscillation between pitches. You could just say “ah” and then say it in a little bit higher of a pitch and it could technically be called vibrato. Just shift back and forth between pitches as quickly as possible without slurring your speech. Start out slow and quicken it as you go. If you have a piano, take 2 keys beside each other and alternate playing them. Match your pitch to the pitch of the keys and continue that pattern as quickly as you can.

Honestly there is not much to it when it comes to learning how to sing vibrato. In my own personal journey of learning how to sing vibrato, I just had to be intentional about it every time I went to sing. It took a good while for it to fully develop, but now my vibrato comes out as naturally as my singing voice. It just takes time, patience and training.

If you are interested in finding a program that will help you learn how to sing vibrato, you should try out Brett Manning’s Mastering Vibrato program. At only $49.95 and a 6 month back money guarantee, it is hard to go wrong with purchasing this product. Let me go ahead and tell you – it just plain works! You WILL develop a good vibrato if you use this program as it is intended.

I hope some of these tips are helpful to you! How have you gone about learning how to sing vibrato?

Photo Credits: flickr4jazz (flickr)

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1. What Is The Function Of Your Vibrato?

Because thinning out your voice is such a vital component in developing your mix voice, it is crucial that you learn how to thin out your voice as soon as possible. Shelby Rollins, a new Brett Manning Associate at Singing Success, has made an excellent video that describes one way to thin out your voice. However, this is not the only way to thin our your voice. There are other ways to thin out the voice (which we will discuss below the video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6C4_Z1VBt8

As the video pointed out, vocal fry is an excellent first step towards thinning out your voice, but it could use some help along the way too.

I have found that another way to thin out your voice is to simply practice scales in a lighter sound volume. This is much tougher than it actually sounds. The reason why practicing at a lighter sound volume helps your voice thin out is because it forces you to learn how to bring your vocal cords together in the lightest manner possible in order to produce that light sound. Try this out by using the “mum” exercise. Start out at your normal volume and gradually get lighter and lighter as your practice through your scales. Once you find a volume that proves to be somewhat difficult to connect, stay on that volume until you have taught your vocal cords how to connect at that soft volume. You will notice that as you learn how to connect at lower volumes, your voice will thin out better at a normal volume. It has worked wonders for me – surely it will work for you too.

Another way to thin out your voice is to intentionally practice your exercises with your sound resonating more in your head. For example, let’s take the lip roll. The lip roll can take on many different weights. If you intentionally shift your resonance towards your head when doing lip rolls, your vocal cords will automatically thin out more than if you were to practice lip rolls normally. You can practice lip rolls in this manner in order to develop the sense of how thinning out feels in your own voice.

Learning how to thin out your voice can be tough, but it is well worth the effort and time. What steps have you taken in order to learn how to thin out your own voice?

Photo Credits: garryknight (flickr)

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1. Developing Your Head Voice
2. Finding Your Head Voice
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1) I always, always, always start with a vocal warm up routine. In my mind, this is a non-negotiable step that must be taken by anyone before they sing. Take the time to gently warm up your voice through your normal warm up routine. If you do not already have a vocal warm up routine, view the post I made about vocal warm ups (link is above).

2) Start hydrating yourself a few days before you have to sing. This is especially relevant to me and many other singers now that allergy season is in full bloom. It is very important that you drink plenty of water before, during and after you sing in order to keep enough moisture in your vocal cords. Moisture is the lifeblood of your vocal cords, so make sure that you are always hydrating them with good ole’ H2O.

3) Depending on the situation, I sometimes do some light physical exercises before I sing. If my body is stiff, sore or still tired from the previous day, I will do some dynamic stretches, push ups, sit ups and pull ups. Take notice that I don’t do an entire hardcore workout – I just workout enough to get blood flowing throughout my body (which includes my vocal cords). I’ve also found that working out also relieves me of some of my nerves and tension, so I am incorporating that into my routine more on a regular basis.

4) Finally, I think this is the most important thing you can do in the quest to learn how to prepare your voice for singing: practice. Practice what you are going to sing over and over again. Nail down the tough parts. Be confident in what you will be singing. This goes the longest way in prepping your voice for singing. When you have confidence to sing, the first three things are easy to do and will only bolster your confidence. So practice, practice, practice!

I hope these tips are beneficial to you in some way. What about you? How do you prepare your voice for singing?

Photo Credits: Rodrigo Moraes (flickr)

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Top Five Vocal Exercises for Your Singing Voice

Vocal Exercises – #1: Lip Rolls
The first of the vocal exercises that I will list is the lip roll. In my own personal experience, I have found lip rolls to be the best and most consistent exercise for improving my voice. No matter where my voice is at on a particular day, doing lip rolls slowly works out the kinks in my voice and gives my voice that smooth feel. Lip rolls also help me steady out my airflow to give my voice that consistent, easy feel.

Vocal Exercises – #2: “Nays”
The second vocal exercise I recommend is the “nay” exercise. This whiny, pharyngeal vocal exercise helps your vocal cords get the correct amount of vocal cord closure. The “n” consonant gives your vocal cords that nice bit of closure while the “ay” releases your sound into the pharyngeal spot. This helps develop a smooth connection between chest voice and head voice.

Vocal Exercises – #3: “Mums”
The third vocal exercise I will list is the “mum” exercise. “Mum” is a very neutral vocal exercise, helping you to stabilize your larynx and give you the best amount of resonance space possible. It is important to keep your larynx neutral while doing this exercise (err more on the dopey side with a lower larynx) in order to free up your voice. The “m” sound also gives you solid vocal cord closure, but unlike the “nay” exercise, it tends to work on your chest voice more. This vocal exercise develops a solid foundation for you to spring into your mix voice.

Vocal Exercises – #4: The edgy, staccato “mmm”
The fourth vocal exercise is an edgy, staccato “mmm” sound. It is very squeaky and light, but it does a remarkable job at disengaging your digastric muscles and releasing your voice into your head. It is good to place your thumbs under chin during this exercise in order to completely disengage your digastric muscles. I find that this exercise is one of the most effective and rewarding exercises in the long run because it trains your vocal cords to do all the work (as opposed to “help” from your outer throat muscles).

Vocal Exercises – #5: “Goo”
The fifth and final vocal exercise I will recommend to you is the heady “goo”. “Goo” also gives you excellent vocal cord closure while letting your voice shift into your head. The “g” sound gives you some of the best vocal cord closure while the “oo” moves your resonance towards your head voice. This exercise helps you to develop a strong head voice presence. It also helps you to connect your chest voice to your head voice (so it will build up the elusive mix voice).

Practice these vocal exercises often! They will help your voice tremendously!

Want more of these incredible vocal exercises? Brett Manning’s Singing Success is proven to increase your vocal range, tone and the overall quality of your voice. Click here to purchase it today and begin your journey of complete vocal control and freedom!

Photo Credits: mikebaird (flickr)

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Learning how to breathe properly is a very important factor in learning how to sing better.

Some people put great emphasis on breath support. Other people put little emphasis on breath support. I just want to put breath support in its proper place.

If learning how to breathe properly was all we needed in order to learn how to sing better, singing would be so much easier. But oh, things aren’t always that simple..and such is the case with singing.

For starters, I want to assert that you need to learn breath support. Period. There is no way of getting around this. You need air to create sound (phonate). Therefore, it would seem logical that you would need to learn how to regulate your air support when creating your sound, right? Right!

I want to go ahead and assert that I am coming at the subject of how to breathe properly from the stance of vocal cord closure. Without proper vocal cord closure, breath support will not help you one bit….ok, well maybe it will help you burst and shout through your high notes, but your vocal cords will not last very long and your tone won’t be clear. Breath support is most appropriately exercised when coming from a position of vocal cord closure.

Let’s further unpack this idea of learning how to breathe properly by examining what is actually going on regarding vocal cord closure and breath support. The vocal cords are positioned horizontally across your larynx. To get this image in your head, hold your hand out and make the peace sign. Now I want you to open and close the peace sign. This is a representation of how your vocal cords function. When the peace sign is open, that is like the resting state of the vocal cords (vocal abduction). When the peace sign is closed, that is like the singing state of the vocal cords (vocal adduction). Now, here is where we get into the healthy tension between vocal cord closure and breath support. You see, if you have proper vocal cord closure but lack breath support, your singing voice will find itself getting stuck in the back of your throat, giving you a kind of Kermit the Frog type of sound. On the flip side, if you have proper breath support but lack vocal cord closure, your singing voice will find itself sounding, well, breathy while being pushed and devoid of tone, causing excess strain on your vocal cords (and your audience’s ears).

Here’s the important factor in all of this: breath support adds that needed pressure to vocal cord closure in order to create a healthy tension within your voice.

Now that you have this, I want to give you some advice regarding breath support.

How To Breathe Properly Tip #1: Practice your breathing exercises regularly!
Your lungs need to be worked out just as much as your vocal cords do. Practice breathing from your diaphragm in order to augment the amount of breath you can take in with a single breath. Breathing from your diaphragm requires your stomach to poke out, not your chest! Take time to practice holding out your breath and work on increasing the length on time you can sing on a single breath.

How To Breathe Properly Tip #2: Practice breathing through your high notes!
As singers, we have a tendency to forget that we still need to breathe properly through our high notes. While we do not need as much breath on our high notes as we do for our lower notes, we still need to breathe through the high notes. If we forget to breathe through the high notes, our tone ends up sounding strained (this sound is different from the sound tension produces) and gets stuck in the back of our mouth. In this sense, we want to bring our sound forward (hey, doesn’t this sound familiar to classical teaching styles? – now you know what they mean!) by remembering to breathe properly through our high notes.

Obviously this list is not an exhaustive list, but it does highlight some of the main struggles that singers have regarding breath support. In my own personal experience and study, I find that most beginner singers struggle with this because they don’t know how to breathe properly and more advanced singers struggle with this because they forget that they still need to breathe properly.

Enacting proper breath support along with vocal cord closure will give you exceptional control over your voice. I think you will find the results pretty amazing when you get the two to flow hand in hand!

What are your own experiences with breath support? I’d love to hear from you!

As always, sing on my friends!

Photo Credits: 1

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Although there are many technical definitions of what chest voice actually is, it is most widely known and understood as our normal speaking and/or singing voice. For our purposes, chest voice is the range in which we feel completely comfortable singing and speaking. It is marked by the majority of the resonance being located in the chest. There are more specific definitions than these, but the general outcomes are still the same.

I find that chest voice receives much less attention than it actually deserves. In fact, chest voice should deserves just as much attention as any other area of our voice. Why? Simply because we most often sing in our chest voice. Therefore I find it quite necessary that we engage and train our chest voice just as much as (if not more than) our head voice and mixed voice.

Somehow we get this faulty idea that since we speak and sing in our chest voice all the time, we are in no need of training it. Wrong! Your chest voice may be stronger than your head voice or mixed voice, but that does not necessarily mean it has been properly trained. And here’s why.

Even though we speak and sing in chest voice often, we never truly train our vocal cords to function in the proper manner. Since our vocal cords are not trained in the proper manner, they do not give the proper control over chest voice. It now makes sense why people could sing in chest voice for years and still be incredibly pitchy and inconsistent. They are relying on everything except proper vocal cord function. Even though their chest is strong, it still remains untrained.

So how do we train our chest voice?

1) We must first get to the root of the issue. An inconsistent chest voice is only a symptom of the real problem: improper function of the vocal cords. Vocal cord closure is an absolute necessity for properly functioning vocal cords. Getting the vocal cords to come together correctly is the first step in creating a smooth, rich and controlled chest voice. The proper amount of vocal cord closure implies proper breath support as well. Breath support is also key for developing your chest voice. Breath support is not the focus but rather a supplementary element of vocal cord closure. When you fill your diaphragm with the proper amount of air and control it correctly with cord closure, you have the ability to produce that rich and controlled sound.

Here is what I would do in order to start training your chest voice.

I would practice the exercises “mum” and “buh” on octave scales, repeating the “mum” or “buh” 4 times at the top and holding out that note. If I were to write it out, it be like this:

mum-mum-mum-mum mum mum muuuuuuuuuuuuum-mum-mum-mum

or

buh-buh-buh-buh buh buh buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh-buh-buh-buh

As you ascend up the scale, focus on controlling the notes as you sing them.

You can also work on developing your chest voice by humming a particular note in your chest voice and holding it out for 10 seconds. Go to the next note higher, hum it and hold it out for 10 seconds. Focus on controlling the sound you are making. As you begin to gain control, increase the amount of time you spend holding out the note. This will help regulate your breath and develop your chest voice.

So what are the benefits of having a solid chest voice? Here are 2 tangible benefits:

1) excellent control over your vocals
2) a launching pad for adding energy into your mix

Like I said earlier, vocal cord closure is quite important to developing that rich sound in your chest voice. Grasping that concept and implementing it into your singing will do wonders for your voice!

As always, sing on my friends!

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1) Take your finger, press the flat side under your chin and run it down your neck.

2) When the feel the bump in your neck (for guys it is easy (Adam’s apple), girls a little tougher), congratulations! You have found your larynx!

Now I just want you to imagine your larynx rising in your throat. Swallow for a moment and feel it rise. See how far up in your throat it is? When your larynx rises, it constricts the vocal cords and cuts off a lot of resonance space for your sound. What you end up with: tension, and a lot of it.

In fact, I would muse to say that this is the most common cause of tension when people try to sing high notes. Their larynx rises high because it falsely gives the “feeling” that it will make the high notes easier. You then discover that it just plain hurts to sing the notes. You also begin to wonder why you feel like there is a lump in your throat. Guess what? There is a lump in your throat – your larynx!

In order to neutralize your larynx, you must train your larynx. What I personally have to do is place my finger on top of my Adam’s apple when it is in the resting position. Then, when I go to sing, I make sure that my larynx does not rise above my finger. Warning: it sounds much easier than it actually is. If you have never worked on neutralizing your larynx before, this little trick may be difficult at first. But no worries, with time and training, you will have your larynx in a neutral state in no time!

Exercises that help keep your larynx neutral are “mum”, “buh”, and “guh”. Be sure to keep a dopey sound underneath your tone as you practice them on scales. Singing these phrases automatically lowers your larynx. Be sure to place your finger on top of your Adam’s apple when doing these exercises as well.

It will take time to train your larynx to stay neutral when singing. However, if you really focus and take the time to intentionally train, you can speed up the process dramatically.

When you have successfully trained your larynx to stay neutral, you will notice a freedom in the voice that you had not felt before. Less tension. More power. Isn’t this what every singer desires?

As always, sing on my friends!

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Just to clarify, mix is generally the part of the voice that lies between your first and third bridges (or passaggios). Learning how to sing in this area of your voice takes concentrated time and effort. I know this from firsthand experience.

It did not take long for me to uncover my mix when I first started singing. I discovered my head voice in just a couple of days and my mix in a couple of months. Needless to say I have been rigorously training the two ever since. I must confess that I still have not mastered these two parts of my voice, and quite frankly don’t know if I ever will. But I do know that I am continually learning and gaining new understanding about singing in these areas each day that I practice.

I personally struggle with carrying too much vocal weight from the bottom (chest) as I go into my mix. Since I struggle with this so much, I have to consciously be aware of how I warm up my mix. I first have to start in a very light spot with a lowered larynx, just barely connecting in my mix. I may even have to do some edgy vocal fry exercises to get that initial connection. Once I find that connection, I vocalize lightly using “mum” on a 5 or 7 tone scale. I gradually bring in compression, moving from “mum” to “bweh”, from “bweh” to “guh”, from “guh” to “buh”. If I feel any of these exercises are too heavy, I go back and work on the previous exercise some more or switch to a light weight exercise such as “quo” or “pwee”. Only when I have completely warmed up my mix and placed it in a comfortable spot will I attempt to sing songs that require my mix.

Some days I have it – some days I don’t. When I am struggling mightily to get into my mix, I forgo mix training for that day and work on another area of my voice. Remember, there is always something to work on with your voice, so don’t get discouraged if one part isn’t working like it should. We are human. We have good days and bad days. We just have to make the best of each day. Always be ready to train another part of your voice when your mix is being ornery!

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High notes are easy…once correct technique is learned. Trying to sing high notes without correct vocal technique is like trying to find a narrow path in the dark. Consider the professional golfer. They make it look so easy when they step up to the ball and blast a drive 325 yards right down the center of the fairway. Yet each golfer has a different approach to their swing. The mechanics generally remain the same: they have the proper balance, weight shift, club head speed, rotation and follow through when the hit a ball perfectly – but each golfer has a distinct swing. It is the same with every singer. You must have a proper technique and foundation in order to sing high notes, but your approach will be different from other singers that are using the same technique and foundation. This is why it is so critically important that you experiment some with your voice. Remember, your vocal cords and resonance chambers are unique, so cookie-cutter programs and lessons will not completely form you into a fantastic singer of high notes. While they can give you the proper vocal technique and foundation, they cannot give you all the results you want. You must experiment and discover your own voice!

With that being said, singing high notes can be frustrating if you do not have the proper foundation. I will harp on this over and over again because it is so vitally important: you must learn vocal cord closure in order to build your foundation for singing high notes. Without vocal cord closure, you have no other choice but to blast out air in order to sing the high notes, which in turn hurts your vocal cords. Trust me on this one – you want to learn vocal cord closure before you seriously embark on singing high notes.
*View the article on vocal cord closure to get more in-depth details.

Once you have the vocal cord closure, you then need to maintain vocal compression in order to sustain these high notes. A loss in compression results in an imbalance in the voice, giving way to a break or crack during the high notes. Vocal compression will help keep your vocal cords connected while giving you an expressive texture on the high notes.

Once you have learned these two techniques, singing high notes will become easier and easier. This is not a magical fix that will cure all your singing troubles, but it is the pathway that leads to vocal freedom and beautiful high notes. Once again, you must continually experiment with your own voice to find out best way to achieve these high notes. Your voice should never become sore or begin hurting during your experiments. If that turns out to be the case, stop trying that experiment and move on to something else. Vocal health is crucial and you never want to sacrifice your vocal cords for a few notes!

Believe in yourself. Take the time to learn the techniques and the results will be rewarding. Until next time, sing on my friends!

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