In the moments leading up to an audition or performance, there are many factors that are beyond your control. One of the most valuable traits a singer can cultivate is an ability to roll with the punches. You never know when you may find yourself having to sing your heart out while contending with a pianist who is unfamiliar with your repertoire, an excruciatingly dry room, or a chance encounter with your ex.
You must be prepared for anything. Fortunately, your preparation is something that you have some measure of control over. The purpose of this column is to break down the elements of an effective warm-up routine and offer guidelines for devising your own.
There is no universal warm-up protocol that would suit all singers under every circumstance. When I recently asked friends, colleagues, and students to share their warm-up routines, their responses ran the gamut from a lengthy protocol comprising meditation, stretches, scales, and repertoire spot-checking to a mere three minutes of vocalizing in a quiet hallway right before an audition. The point of a warm-up is to take you from where you are to where you need to be in order to sing your best. Therefore, what you personally need from a warm-up routine will vary, depending on the general default condition of your body, voice, and mind.
An effective warm-up conditions your body to respond to the physical demands of singing, primes your vocal technical coordination, and centers your mind.
Conditioning Your Body for Singing
Professor David Ley teaches voice and speech at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and has extensively researched the connection between physical movement and vocal production. I spoke with him about the role warming up the body plays in warming up the voice. “The goal of the warm-up is to get us to a place where we can function optimally and enjoy peak performance,” Ley explains.
It begins by taking inventory. “I need to figure out where my body is,” Ley continues. “I need to figure out what’s happening with my breath. Once you’ve done a bit of a diagnostic you can say, ‘Here’s where I feel tight today’ and you can pull out specific exercises to help you open those areas up.”
A series of circular movements beginning at the ankles and working up through the body is a useful check-in to identify areas of tension, paying particular attention to the hips. “If your hips are tight, I guarantee your diaphragm is going to be locked,” Ley says, “and it’s going to be difficult for it to be responsive and for you to get the depth of breath that you need.”
Ley also emphasizes loosening up the shoulders. “This world we live in conspires to make our shoulders climb up our necks in so many different ways,” he says. “Simply circling the shoulders around is a great diagnostic to simply see how much tension you may have [in that area].”
Like athletes, Ley explains that singers also benefit from an increase in blood flow and the suppleness that confers upon muscles and tendons. This means literally “warming up” tense areas by raising the temperature of the musculature, and this can be achieved through stretching or aerobic exercise. This decreases viscous resistance between layers of muscle—in other words, muscle groups move more smoothly and easily across each other. The increase in warmth confers greater mobility not only upon large muscle groups, such as those involved in breathing, but also upon the intrinsic and extrinsic muscles of the larynx.
How much activity is enough to achieve this desired suppleness throughout the body? It differs from singer to singer, and your own needs will vary from day to day. If you are habitually active and athletic, you may not need much in the way of a physical warm-up before you sing. If you’ve been sitting in a lecture hall or on a train for a few hours, you will need more of a warm-up than you would have had you started your day with a run.
Remember that the point of your warm-up is to prepare for the activity of singing, not to get in an actual workout—take care not to overly tax your musculature or deplete your energy stores. Take inventory of your physical tensions and level of vitality, develop a strategy to generate the supple liveliness you need to sing your best, and keep track of the level of activity that contributes to your best performances.
Priming Your Vocal Coordination
The purpose of the vocal portion of your warm-up is to prime the various components of your voice to meet the challenges of the repertoire you are about to present and to optimize your coordination for singing. Throughout the day, your respiratory system, throat, and articulatory and resonating anatomy perform many functions other than singing, most of which do not require their precise integration with one another. Your warm-up is what transforms you from a commonplace human being to a state-of-the-art musical instrument.
Just as you should take inventory of how your body is feeling and functioning, you must also investigate where you are starting out vocally and what you must do to create optimal conditions for performance. Compare your moment-to-moment respiratory and vocal function with the way you need your breathing and voice to behave while singing:
• How expansively do you breath by default? Does your breathing include expansive diaphragmatic and costal activity? Is there any holding in your abdomen or rib cage?
• How free and functional is your speaking voice? Is it focused or a little breathy? Do you note any tightness or vocal fry? How much of your range do you utilize in speech?
• How does your habitual speech articulation compare with your ideal articulatory coordination for singing?
I recommend making these comparisons not because I want your normal breathing and speech patterns to rise to the standards you uphold for your singing, but so that you can map a clear and direct path from default to optimal vocal coordination.
Every singer’s path will differ. I’ll offer mine as an example:
• Breathing: My breathing is relatively expansive by default—not only because I follow a regular fitness regimen but also because as a voice teacher, I model breathing for singing throughout most of my work day. The major difference between my default breathing pattern and the way I breathe in singing is that I strive to maintain a high sternum and an open rib cage while singing—whereas in normal breathing, my chest rises and falls.
• Speaking voice: My speaking voice has become more focused, fluid, and resonant over the years thanks to regular vocalizing; however, I speak with heavier registration and far less expansive resonance than I would use to sing. My speaking voice traverses about a sixth at the bottom of my range.
• Articulation: My daily use of my articulators is far from optimal. Years of playing the clarinet developed excessive strength and tension in my jaw, lips, and tongue. I also talk a great deal throughout my work day, and habitual speech patterns take hold.
For my vocal warm-up, I therefore engage in exercises to establish good breath coordination, modulate my registration, access my full resonance and range, and stretch and coordinate my articulators. Another singer whose default is closer to optimal in my target areas might not need to spend any time on these things, but I do.
Vocalizing also serves to improve neuromuscular connectivity between the muscles governing respiration and laryngeal and articulatory movement—it revitalizes those neural pathways that will most expediently coordinate and execute the movements you will perform while singing.
Your ideal vocal warm-up routine will accomplish three things:
1. It will prepare the individual components of your voice for singing.
2. It will coordinate them together so they function as a unified whole.
3. It will touch on the full range of pitches, dynamics, and respiratory demands you are about to meet so that your neural pathways are primed to set all required activities in motion.
This does not mean that your warm-up need take very long. A few wide-ranging scales and sustained passages may be all that you need to meet all of these goals. Do only what is necessary to prepare your voice for performance and refrain from anything that could lead to fatigue. In an interview for Opera News, tenor Hugh Panaro advised against doing too much singing before a performance. “I’ve known wonderful singers who leave their best performance in the dressing room by over-singing,” he said. “I check to make sure the middle and bottom are warm and do lip flutters to see that the breath is free-flowing and properly directed.”
Centering Your Mind
I began this column by observing that one of the most valuable traits a singer can cultivate is an ability to roll with the punches. Your ability to focus your mind is, therefore, at least as important as everything else you do to ready yourself for performance.
Mental focus is a skill that can be developed and elevated through meditation, yoga, and other practices that build mindfulness. I find that the practice of singing itself is a rich means of cultivating present-moment awareness. If you find that you can become distracted and anxious when conditions are beyond your control, it is essential that you adopt a strategy for remaining focused and present.
Each person’s potential level of focus exists along a continuum. Bring to mind an experience of singing when you were at your most dramatically committed, vocally free, emotionally engaged, and in sync with your pianist or other collaborators. Then inventory internal thoughts and external events that have at times pulled your focus away from your singing. While you likely could not have controlled either those external events or even the arising of those internal thoughts, you can develop skills to keep your mental focus trained on your music making.
It’s useful to think about “warming up” your mind the same way you can your physical and vocal preparation: assess your current level of focus, compare it with your ideal mental conditions for performance, and map a path for getting yourself there. Potential distractions increase as you near the place and time of your audition or performance, so time your mental warm-up to enable you to greet the escalating stimuli with all possible equanimity.
Most important, allow that equanimity to extend not only to circumstances that may arise around your performance but also to your own current level of artistic achievement. You will continue to expand on your prowess and vision, but sharing the best of what you have to offer right now means wholly accepting and celebrating yourself as you are.
As performance psychologist Noa Kageyama sums up in his blog, Bulletproof Musician, “Great performers know that they’ve already put in the work, and that in the last hours before a big performance what’s most important is to get into the right physical, mental, and emotional state to perform their best. Whether it’s a nap, meditation, prayer, a few slow scales or long tones to connect to your instrument, or eating a banana/egg/peanut butter sandwich and milk while hopping on one leg, the great ones know what they need, and they simply do it, regardless of the circumstances.”
An effective warm-up takes you from where you are to where you need to be. I’d love to imagine that perfect readiness to sing will someday be your default moment-to-moment state and encourage all of you to aspire to that. But for now, I counsel acceptance of the fact that certain elements of your physical, vocal, and mental readiness require attention and elevation to ensure your best possible performance. Take inventory of what that means for you individually, take action to develop a regimen that will get you where you need to be, and be ready to roll with the punches when the moment arrives.
