Last week I wrote about Why a warm up shouldn’t be just vocal exercises.
This week I’m going to revisit five old posts which look at warm ups in more detail. This is one of a series of summary posts around a specific topic, bringing together five relevant posts from the past.
Many of us choir leaders are constantly on the look-out for new warm up ideas.
Whenever I look on the internet, I always come across sheet music for vocalises. But these are only a small part of what a warm up should be.
I ran a full day of singing last Saturday. At the end, a few people came up to say that their throats hurt.
Let’s look at why this might be and how you might avoid it.
I’m always looking for new ideas for the warm up start of my singing sessions.
But constant novelty is not necessarily a good thing. It can often lead to overlooking old, familiar, tried and tested exercises.
Familiarity breeds contempt. If you do the same thing over and over again it can become boring.
However, constantly introducing new things can be hard work and it can feel like you never arrive. How do we maintain a balance between these two extremes?
I give an introductory pep talk at the start of all my singing workshops.
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The aim is to give out useful information, but also to reassure and relax the singers.
In a recent blog post, Robert Sussuma urges singers to “stop warming up, doing exercises, and practising.”
He is being a little provocative, but it has prompted me to reflect on whether singers need to warm up or not before singing.
As a member of the Natural Voice Network (NVN), I share a belief that our voices are rooted in our bodies.
But it’s not just the NVN, most professional singers believe this too.
I thought I’d share a few vocal exercises that I use to help singers tune in to a cappella harmony.
I often integrate these into the warm up sessions to get people listening more closely before we move on to learning harmony songs.
I believe that proper preparation for singing is vital.
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But sometimes I forget to explain why to singers who come to my one-off sessions. This is what I should remember to tell them.
Choirs are not meeting at the moment so lots of you have gone online to sing.
Given that it will be just you singing at a screen, what can you do to get the most out of an online singing session?
