Over the years as a professional singer and voice teacher, I’ve come to a new way of thinking about the vocal warmup. Earlier in my vocal development, I thought of my singing warmup in the way I think a lot of you do—as this thing I needed to do to get my voice up and running. I would do my warmup automatically, plowing through with the mindset that I just needed to get my voice warm so I could do the thing I really wanted to do: practice my repertoire.
But here’s what I’ve noticed after all these years of performing and teaching. Using warmup exercises just for the purposes of warming up is a huge missed opportunity and a total waste of time. The mere fact that you’re doing vocal warmup exercises is not going to make you a better singer—in fact, for a lot of you, it’s probably keeping you stuck at the level you’re at (I’ll explain in a moment).
Today I challenge you to change the purpose of your warmup so that it’s not a waste of time and not a missed opportunity, but rather it becomes something that will 100 percent make you a better singer.
So what is the purpose of warming up? The common answer is that it gets your body, breath, resonance, and energy moving for singing. But that’s only going to help you sing better if your body, breath, resonance, and energy get moving in the right way. That is the purpose of warming up. Not to get your voice moving, but to get your voice moving in the right way. Here’s the fundamental shift I want you to make in your mindset around warming up: There is no difference between warming up and practicing. The warmup is the practice. The practice is the warmup.
How to Become a Singer It’s in the warmup that you set the foundations in your body and in your mind for the singing to come. In this sense, it really doesn’t matter which vocal exercises you do to warmup. I’m always asked what are the best warmup exercises to do and really, any exercise can be beneficial or detrimental depending on how you do it.
That’s what I meant when I said that for a lot of you, your vocal warmup may be keeping you stuck at your current level. It’s not that you’re doing the wrong exercises or need new ones. You aren’t progressing because you’re not focusing on the how of the warmup exercises. Right now your warmup isn’t practice. It’s just warmup. The how wasn’t part of the way the warmup exercises were taught to you and it isn’t the focus of the way you do them now. You just end up warming up all your old habits, carrying that into whatever song you’re singing, and getting frustrated because the song doesn’t feel or sound as good as it could.
For instance, I start every lesson the same way. Whether you’re an advanced singer with lots of technique who’s been studying with me for a long time, or a brand-new student, I always start with lip trills. I do that because in my view, lips trills are fundamental to understanding consistent breath support. Since consistent support is the foundation of great singing, that’s the first thing I want to set in a warmup. If you’re not focused on the how when doing them, then you’ll blaze through them semi-efficiently and miss out on reinforcing one of the foundations of your singing. In focusing on the how, we bring our attention and awareness to our breath support, reinforcing the muscle memory of what efficient support feels like in our body and warming that up.
When you are super present to the how of your warmup exercises, you set the foundations of your technique. The exercises stop being a mere warmup and instead become a practice that will have a huge effect on your ability to reach the potential of your voice much more quickly and with much less frustration.
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