Welcome to my “Singers Survival Tips Series”! Feel free to ask questions and comment. Want to know more about doing a proper vocal warm up and why you should do it? Watch this Part 2 video on just that. Be sure to listen to the special offers. Links below…and if you haven’t watched part 1 yet…. go back and have a look!
Shortcuts: 0:00 Welcome and watch for special offers 0:19 Question – How long should I …. 1:14 Best practice 1:40 Crazy Comments 2:47 1st Special Offer 3:53 2nd Offer – personalized warm up file 4:30 What does Matt from 3 Days Grace say? 4:49 Stefan from PUP 6:00 Go to website (links above) 6:15 Stay tuned and thanks for watching
Transcript
Hi, I’m Mitch Seekins – The Vocal Coach welcome to my “Singers Survival Tip” series! Welcome to part 2 of warming up! Please be sure to watch to the end for the special offer!. If you find this video useful and that you have learned something….please share and hit that subscribe button…I have much more to come!
How long should I warm up for?
- I have always viewed singing as an athletic event. If you imagine yourself as an athlete, you can often rationalize how to approach things. A top-level athlete will ALWAYS warm up before a competition. This ensures that the body’s muscles are warm, all the kinks are worked out and they are ready to perform. They would never warm up to the point where it becomes a “workout”. You should never waste the energy you need for peak performance. The goal is to get the muscles prepped for peak performance!
- From a singer’s standpoint, it’s the same. Unless you’ve begun the process of getting everything moving how could you ever expect to perform at your peak? For a vocalist in today’s music business, being in top form and consistent is a must!
- What I have found to work best, is a warmup lasting 10 to 15 min, that should end approx. 20 to 30 min prior to the show. Having a short rest after a vocal warm up is important as it allows the muscles to relax and if there is any residual phlegm left, time for it to clear. Like any pro athlete you need to work that into a pre-performance habit, so you always do it.
Sometimes I’ll hear a comment like:
Do I really need to do this? Usually, I just go out and scream my face off! Seems to work for me!
Or I warm up by screaming into a pillow before show time.
- Ummm…yeeaahh… good luck with that. You can’t expect that to work for long. Firstly… That’s not really warming up, that’s just abusing the voice. You’re gonna fatigue those muscles out, using up energy, wasting it before you even hit the stage! And secondly Aging is a bitch… and there is no avoiding it. When it comes to vocal recovery after a show, (many of my students sing extremely aggressive shows in front of THOUSANDS of fans at a time) it simply takes time. And the older you get, the more time it takes! Think about the aging athlete. Warming up beforehand really helps in your ability to NOT hurt the voice during a performance, let alone completely abusing the voice before the performance! Successful artists take care of their instruments so they can enjoy long careers.
So, there is a basic overview of vocally warming up and why you need to do it! Here are 2 special offers for you. Stick around for both
The 1st – I’m going to give you is a free sample of my Lip Trill warmup that I use for my students. This is an arpeggio pattern that is “generic” in range, that you can either stream or download for you to use. Personally, I would download them as then you would never get caught if at a gig the internet signal is weak. Just put it on your phone, plug in one ear bud (use your other ear to hear yourself!) and go to work!
- If you find the starting point too low or the top notes too high for your range just wait until the notes come around that work for you. The file I’m sharing is a common range file that should work for about 95% of you. There will be one file for the male voice and one for the female voice.
- Throughout the file not only will I be playing the notes to trill to, I will also be “coaching” you on what to think or visualize while you run through the scales.
The 2nd is an offer to create a personal warm up regiment for you! Its very important that you understand how to do the exercises properly, so this does take a little bit of time. What happens is we get together for 3 sessions. the first two sessions I take you through everything, so you learn what you need to do with the technical prompts that I give you in your personalized warm up file. I have been producing these files for my students for many years and they have had great success with them.
Matt Walst – 3 Days Grace- “Before every show… I do about 15 minutes of your warm-up, every time.”
As this is a personalized warm up file it will be the exercises you should and can do for the range you should be working at.
Stefan Babcock – PUP- “I’ve been doing warm-ups for maybe like before shows for maybe a year or so before we started working together yeah but the warm-ups that we do uh are a bit different they’re much more gentle. It’s like about kind of really it’s not a it’s not five minutes like let’s go it’s like really gentle ease back into it spend 20 minutes half an hour to get yourself going … i will not miss a warm-up under any circumstances there’s there’s no circumstances that i’ll go on stage without warming up because i know that that could lead to really big issues. So yeah that means like it’s a bit different now like now that we you know always have like uh decent green rooms and stuff like that but there was a point four or five years ago where we were playing really small shows like uh that we didn’t have a backstage and it was just like well i guess i’m it’s you know it’s negative 20. i’m still gonna sit in the car or go for a walk and do this because i won’t get on stage without doing the warm-ups.
If you go to my website, click on the vocal lesson packages tab on the home page, and it will take you to the details. If you are a pro or not, having a file like this makes things incredibly easy, and goes a long way to save your voice long term!
As I stated in part one of this warm up series, I will post another video showing you how to successfully perform the lip trills, so keep an eye out for that. It will be coming shortly.
Thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed it and learn something! Hit that subscribe button, share and I will see you later!