THE AIMLESS VOCAL WARM-UPS

A vocal warm-up may be explained as any series of exercises that prepare the voice for singing, acting, reading, and any for any other use. Warming-up plays a most important role for any vocalist and also for any human being interested in keeping his/her voice healthy. You can think of warming up as a magical tuning of your human vocal box.

Certainly, when you exercise, run, or play sports, a healthy warm-up is a good way to prepare, improve your performance, and prevent injury to yourself. The same holds true when you use your voice. A vocal warm up improves the quality of the sounds you make and helps prevent vocal injury, keeping you in good voice and making your voice production feel better.

 

But in most of our choirs, vocal exercises are not done before the main activity for the day begins. Only a few masters do vocal warm-ups before practice; however, most of those who do warm-ups do it without an aim. They just play some ‘traditional passages’ for the choristers to sing along or follow; as it has been the usual ritual.

For example, Soprano and Tenor are upper voices while Alto and Bass are lower voices, and so there is no way all parts can comfortably sing 'those highest pitches we are made to sing by force' during warm-ups sections; same applies to low pitches. You always make your choristers sing ‘d-r-m-f-s-l-t-d¹’. Is it not boring to always sing the same things, without knowing what you are using it for? I am not say we should use ‘d-r-m-f-s-l-t-d¹’; but I am saying that we should have purposes for using them.

Our warm-ups should have aims and objectives: you should know whether you are doing a breathing exercise, range expansion exercise, intonation exercise, projection exercises, etc. As such, we should let our choristers know what the task is and give remarks as well. They should know whether the task has been achieved or not; and they should know how to practicalize it when they are singing.

If you don't study the voices of your choristers and you just do any vocal warm-up without any aim, you may end up damaging the voices of your choristers. You will cause vocal injury rather than preventing vocal injury; you may also put much pressure on the voices before the main practice begins and so your choristers will be tired even before you start teaching them the songs for the day;  you should not be surprised if your choristers don't sing to your expectation, you might have caused it.

Let’s put an end to the aimless so-called vocal warm-ups or exercises we do everyday. Study the voices of your choristers and know what they need.