Yawning TechniquesYawning helps to relax your voice, relieve tension and improve range.
You’re less likely to strain the voice by loosening your jaw, tongue, and throat muscles. The motion will also increase the oxygen flow to your brain. This will make you more alert and ready to sing.
Practice this Exercise:
Open your mouth wide and breathe slowly. This will make you yawn. Relax your shoulders and chin.
Close your mouth slowly while bringing your lips close together. Keep your teeth apart.
After you have taken 2-3 breaths, you can make a pitch or humming noise while you exhale. Exhaling, try extending this pitch’s duration or changing the angle every time.
Warm up your body with humming
Humming is a great exercise that significantly stretches your vocal cords without straining.
You can also improve the quality of your voice and vocal resonance. This will make your overall vocal performance better.
How to do this exercise:
Relax the body and your face.
Place your tongue tip behind your bottom front teeth. Make a “hmmm” with your mouth open and your lips closed.
Keep your mouth shut and hum notes in your range. Each time, increase the intensity.
What is it?
There’s a science behind it. The vibrations of the humming sound relax your facial muscles, releasing tension that can affect your voice.
Lip buzzing
Lip trilling, or lip buzzing, is easy and fun to improve breathing control.
This technique involves vibrating your lips rapidly to create a motorboat-like sound.
Practice this Exercise:
Relax your face and lips. Trilling is not for lips that are too tight!
Use your fingers to lift your cheeks and press your lips together like you are about to pucker.
Breathe quickly through your mouth and your nose to make your lips vibrate.
After you have mastered the technique, you can take it to the next step by adding sound by singing long and short notes while trilling. Or, if you want a real challenge, try full-fledged melody.
Tongue trilling
This is similar to lip buzzing, but it focuses on the movement of the tongue.
You’ll need to curl your tongue and roll your “R”s as you move from low to higher.
How to do this exercise:
Place your tongue behind your front teeth.
Breathe in through the nose and then exhale through the mouth.
Roll your mouth to make an “R” or purring sound when you exhale.
As you get better, you can extend the duration of your rolling sound.
Jaw Loosening Techniques
The tightness of the jaw can be detrimental to singers.
You can sing more clearly by releasing the tension in your jaw and mouth.
How to do this exercise:
Drop your jaw as low as you feel comfortable, but not lower than normal speaking. Focus on the space between your ear and jaw.
Massage this area with your fingers and hands in circular motions. This will increase blood flow in the area, allowing it to be more flexible.
Continue massaging your fingers while lowering and lifting your jaw.
It may surprise you that the jawbone is one of the most important muscles for vocal control. It is important to have more jaw movement for singing.
Voice sirens
You can stretch your vocals without breaking your voice by alternating between different ranges and notes.
This one will mimic the rising-and-falling pattern of a siren by using different vocal tones.
Practice this Exercise:
Make an “ooh sound” by practicing.
Start with the lowest note of your vocal range, then gradually move up to the highest you can comfortably reach.
While still holding the “ooh,” glide down to the lowest possible note.
Repeat this process many times to start sounding like an emergency vehicle when you make a 911 call.
Do not do anything that does not feel comfortable. Extending the range of your voice beyond what you are comfortable with could cause vocal cord damage and strain. Listen to your body, and improve your register gradually over time.
Breathe in deeply
Breathing correctly is essential to giving your voice power, control, and an expressive tone. These are the ingredients that make a great vocal performance.
This can be done by inhaling through your diaphragm and then exhaling with a hiss.
How to do this exercise:
Standing up straight will help you relax your shoulders, chest, and body.
Breathe in slowly through your mouth. This should take around five seconds. Your belly should expand outward as you breathe slowly, careful not to raise your chest or shoulders.
While exhaling, make an “sss”-like sound while keeping your chest and shoulder relaxed.
Try inhaling and exhaling longer as you perform this exercise to increase lung capacity.
Make vowel sounds
Vowel sounds can improve your vocal clarity as well as your articulation.
How?
Improving your singing by improving the tone, pitch, and vowel shape makes sense.
Knowing the correct lip, tongue, and jaw positions is important when forming vowel shapes on your face.
Practice this Exercise:
Sing the vowel sounds on the same pitch.
– Maintain a consistent shape in your mouth to speak clearly and naturally.
Then, start moving up the pitch by half a step each time.
Repeat the exercise, and then sing vowels in all your vocal ranges. Pay attention to how your mouth looks and the vowels open or close the muscles behind your throat.
Tongue Twisters
Everybody loves tongue twisters. These tongue twisters are fun and challenging, but they also have the potential to improve your vocal articulation.
It’s important to avoid a crisis of tongue-tied when performing on stage. You can ensure that you are pronouncing the words you sing by reciting some tongue twisters before your performance.
It is because tongue twisters train your brain and mouth how to transition between different syllables.
Practice this Exercise:
Repeat a phrase slowly, at first.
As you gain more confidence, increase the speed and repeat the phrase several times.
As you improve, try repeating the phrase in different pitches.