Free lessons on How To Warmup Your Voice

The first thing to remember is that your body is part of your voice. If you are going to do any warm up vocal exercises it is best to approach it from the point of view of an athlete. If you are an athlete training for any sport, you would start by warming up the different muscle groups slowly, thus making sure that there is no chance of straining or injuring any of the muscles in your body.

No athlete gets up first thing in the morning and starts running. The body needs to be warmed up first. The same in this case applies to the voice. You do not wake up in the morning and immediately start singing at the top of your voice. You would be in danger of straining or doing some damage, or at least putting terrible stress on your vocal chords.

In ideal circumstances you would only start the vocal warm up process an hour or two after you have woken up. This will give your vocal chords some time to wake up. In most cases in that time you would have spoken to someone or at least have some sort of conversation.

Starting the warm up process for your voice is like warming up different muscle groups. Your voice has different segments. This can be divided up into three segments. Although for vocal training purposes the voice is regarded as seamless from the bottom of the range right to the top, it can be divided up for easier understanding:

1. Chest Voice (or lower voice)
2. Middle register
3. Top register

Each one of these segments of your voice is important. If you use the analogy of an athlete that does high jump, the athlete does not immediately set the bar for the highest possible height. The process starts from the height that is most comfortable for the athlete to get the body into the swing of things.
In this case when you warm up your voice you can start with a gentle humming exercise that consists of more air than actual vocalizing. The aim in this case is too gently wake up the vocal chords by having gentle sustained humming in the lower part of the voice. In this case it does not have to be a specific note. Just something that feels natural in your voice range.

From there you gently increase in range of the humming to extend into the middle range of the voice. The key thing to remember at this point is that there must be absolute minimum pressure on the vocal chords. The point is not to start a full warming up process, but to initially gently stretch the vocal chords.
Remember that the jaw has to be relaxed.

The tongue should be in a natural position in the mouth. This will enable the vibrations to go into the natural resonance cavities in the mask and chest. This is one of the key factors in how to warm up your voice. The humming exercise can then be used throughout the entire voice making sure that the voice is evenly warmed up before starting any vocalize exercises.