The Ten Steps of the Series are as follows:

1. Introduction (this post)
2. Sustaining Breath
3. Dabs of Sound
4. Exploring Lower Range
5. Jaw Swinging
6. Small Tongue Rolls
7. Soft Palate Lifting
8. Lip Isolations
9. Chest Resonance
10. Articulation of FFFricatives
11. Jawless Text
12. Conclusion

As a bonus, I’m adding a second post today, as this post really just spells out where we’re going next: I’m sure you want something new to do today, not just read! The bonus is a post on one of the most commonly done physical exercises used in voice work, the spinal roll, or “Roll-Down.”

This entire series is available for download in an audio format from the Intermediate Warm-up Series Playlist page.

Each step in the warm-up has two formats: long-form, and condensed. The long-form is me reading the blog post, so that you can learn the step properly and carefully, and come to understand the logic behind it. The condensed format is just that: it’s me leading you through the step, with very little explanation about how to do the exercise. Use this if you’ve already read the post, or have studied with me before.

1. Roll-Down | Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
2. Sustaining Breath| Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
3. Dabs of Sound| Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
4. Exploring Lower Range| Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
5. Jaw Swinging| Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
6. Small Tongue Rolls| Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
7. Soft Palate Lifting | Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
8. Lip Isolations| Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
9. Chest Resonance| Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
10. Articulation of FFFricatives| Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio
11. Jawless Text| Long-Form Audio | Condensed Audio

The next series will tackle an "Advanced" Warm-up, which will probably be the last series of this kind for some time. I mean it to be the next step beyond this intermediate warm-up, and the three series, basic, intermediate and advanced, should serve as a starting place to working on your voice on a regular, daily basis. These warm-ups are meant to be mix-n-match, so you can play around with any of the exercises as you see fit, as long as you cover all the food groups in your warm-up.

Once I've worked my way through the Advanced series, I plan to do a series on speech, and then I expect the blog to take on a rather different schedule, working each day of the week on a different topic, including speech, text, dialect, accents, presentation, and related skills (like practising or memorization). There's a lot ahead for the voiceguy and for you, so I hope you'll keep coming back to visit.

This exercise seeks to challenge you to integrate some of the feeling you've gotten from the warm-up up to this point into your acting. In particular, the focus is on letting your jaw stay out of the way, and encourage your tongue to do the work. For this step in the warm-up, you'll need a piece of text, preferrably a memorized text, to apply the work to.

I will be using a passage of Cassius' from Julius Caesar: "Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world | Like a Colossus…" (The picture at left is an artist’s rendering of the Colossus at Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.) I'll be using a First Folio edition to discuss the text, but that's not important. It's merely what I have on hand. Here's the speech:

Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walke under his huge legges, and peepe about
To finde our selves dishonourable Graves .
Men at sometime, are Masters of their Fates .
The fault (deere Brutus) is not in our Starres,
But in our Selves, that we are underlings .
Brutus and Cæsar : What should be in that Cæsar?
Why should that name be sounded more then yours :
Write them together : Yours, is as faire a Name :
Sound them, it doth become the mouth aswell :
Weigh them, it is as heavy : Conjure with 'em,
Brutus will start a Spirit as soone as Cæsar,
Now in the names of all the Gods at once,
Upon what meate doth this our Cæsar feede,
That he is growne so great? Age, thou art sham'd .
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of Noble Bloods .
When went there by an Age, since the great Flood,
But it was fam'd with more then with one man?
When could they say (till now) that talk'd of Rome,
That her wide Walkes incompast but one man?
Now it is Rome indeed, and Roome enough
When there is in it but one onely man .
O! you and I, have heard our Fathers say,
There was a Brutus once, that would have brook'd
Th'eternall Divell to keepe his State in Rome,
As easily as a King .

Clearly, from the title of this posting, you can guess what we're going to do. We're going to try to speak the text, as intelligibly as possible, without using our jaws, or at least as little as possible. The challenge, of course, is in the "intelligibly" part. Speaking aloud is hard enough as it is; immobilizing your jaw in the midst of it is madness, surely.

Agreed, it will be difficult, but the point is not to keep this strategy as a lifelong habit. No. The idea is merely to experiment with the feeling of having the jaw dropped. You may find that you can have more space in your mouth without too much effort.

Voweling the Text

To begin, let's focus on the vowels of the text by "voweling the text," at least a little, as the vowels are the most open part of any utterance. Vowels can be made with the tongue alone, so we can let the jaw hang while the tongue does its dance inside the mouth to articulate the vowels. Speaking a text with vowels only sounds rather strange, and for many people it is a mental gymnastics routine that they find frustratingly hard to do. Go slowly, and be sure to let the sound flow from one vowel to the next without any breaks. So, in the text above, I would "chunk" the text up into little bits of two or three words, and flow my way through the vowels, like this:

Text: Why Man
Vowels: eye a
IPA: [aɪ ˈæ ]

He doth bestride
Ee uh uh Eye
[ iː ˌʌ ə ˈaɪ ]

the narrow world
uh air owe ur
[ ə ˈɛə oʊ ˈɜː ]

like a collossus
eye uh uh ah uh
[ˌaɪ ə ə ˈɒ ə]

This then should be done to the whole text, chunk by chunk. Once you've worked your way through the whole text, try to put it together, flowing all the vowels of a thought onto a single breath, like this…

Text: Why man he doth bestride the narrow world like a collossus…
Vowels: eye a Ee uh uh Eye uh air owe ur eye uh uh ah uh
IPA: [aɪ ˈæ iː ˌʌ ə ˈaɪː ə ˈɛə oʊ ˈɜː ˌaɪ ə ə ˈɒ ə ]

Now try to work your way, slowly, through your entire text, voweling it instead of speaking it. Think the thoughts! Speak this gibberish THINKING the words, but only saying the vowels, letting it flow out, relishing the important word-vowels, and skipping lightly over the less important ones.

Back to the Jaw

We need to try that now with an awareness of the jaw. If you need to do a little jaw shake to remember what a released jaw feels like, do that first. Think of your jaw as being very heavy, as if it was made of lead or concrete, and it was dropping toward the ground. With your imagination focused on a heavy jaw, energize your tongue and lips to articulate the vowels of your text in an focused, precise manner so that the vowels are specific, and never muddy. Remember to flow through the words, as if you were speaking clearly and intelligibly, communicating the feelings behind this text.

Adding Back the Consonants

The final step here is to speak the text "normally," that is, with the consonants back in. Some of the consonants will force you to close your mouth, ie move your jaw, more than others, especially /s/ sounds. For lip consonants ( like /p, b, m/ ), try to leave your jaw open while your lips stretch over your teeth to close, which is tricky to do. It is possible to sound fairly normal while doing this, with practice. The goal here is to practice letting the jaw go, so you can more easily create more space in the mouth for sound. Opening your mouth creates a shape like a megaphone, which amplifies the sound of your voice with less effort. Once you've made it through your whole text with a released jaw, try it again, but this time, merely focus on the text, its ideas and emotions and what it does to you. Is there any carryover from the jaw dropping into this exploration? Usually there is a subtle shift that occurs, where the idea of a heavier jaw becomes more part of the range of possibilities available to you.

• This post is also available in a condensed form, so once you understand the idea of jawless text and voweling, you can add it to your warm-up playlist.

Next Step: Conclusion to the Intermediate Warm-Up Series

In this post, I'll take you through a warm-up exercise for your articulators, in particular the consonant sounds that make friction. But first I'll talk you through a little theory about consonants, and fricatives in general. If you already know about these sounds, or just want to skip right to the exercise, click here.

If the phonetic symbols in this post don’t match the symbols in the image above, please make sure that you have installed a Unicode font that includes all the IPA symbols, for example Charis SIL.Also note that some older versions of Internet Explorer and Safari have bugs that prevent the proper display of certain phonetic symbols. If you’re experiencing problems, I recommend you try the free browsers Firefox or Opera.

Consonant sounds can be categorized by three qualities:

• Where in the mouth they are made, known as "Place",
• How they are made, known as "Manner", and
• Whether the vocal folds are vibrating or not, known as "Voicing."

One of the "manners" of consonants are Fricatives, sounds that are made in such a way that they generate a friction by causing air turbulence as the sound is made. In English, the fricative consonants are heard in the paired words THose things, Vine fine, Zoo sue, Jacques shack. As you may notice, each of those fricative pairs is made in the same place, and all that makes them different from one another is their voicing. For example, TH in "those" is voiced (vd.), while th in "things" is voiceless (vs.). If you can't tell the difference right away, put your finger on your throat so that you can feel the vibration of the voiced sounds.

I'll be using the International Phonetic Alphabet to refer to these sounds, so if you're unfamiliar with these symbols, listen up:

Getting your head around these pairs, [θ ð, f v, s z, ʃ ʒ] isnʼt too difficult. Only 4 of them are new symbols!

The Exercise

For this exercise, we're going to alternate between these pairs, in order to drill each sound's articulation, and embed its muscularity into your muscle memory. We'll work each pair individually, and then we'll put the pairs together into a much more challenging exercise. The vowel we'll work with today is our old standby, "uh," as in "cup, mother," (IPA [ʌ]). However, you could do this exercise with any vowel sound, if you wanted to.

We'll start by repeating [θʌ ðʌ] ("thuh THuh") over and over, tryinɡ to really feel the vibration on the voiced [ð] sound. Now we'll reverse that, and initiate with the voiced sound: [ðʌ θʌ] ("THuh thuh"), repeated over and over. Finally, we'll pair the two patterns: [θʌ ðʌ - ðʌ θʌ] ("thuh THuh – THuh thuh.")

From here on, we'll do exactly the same pattern with each of the other pairs. It's a fairly simple pattern: vs. vd., vd. vs., and vs. vd. – vd. vs. So that's:

[θʌ ðʌ], [ðʌ θʌ], [θʌ ðʌ - ðʌ θʌ]
[fʌ vʌ], [vʌ fʌ], [fʌ vʌ - vʌ fʌ]
[sʌ zʌ], [zʌ sʌ], [sʌ zʌ - zʌ sʌ]
[ʃʌ ʒʌ], [ʒʌ ʃʌ], [ʃʌ ʒʌ - ʒʌ ʃʌ]

Repeat each group in square brackets 5 times ( [θʌ ðʌ, θʌ ðʌ, θʌ ðʌ, θʌ ðʌ, θʌ ðʌ].)

Once you've mastered that, try grouping all the pairs into one drill:

[θʌ ðʌ, fʌ vʌ, sʌ zʌ, ʃʌ ʒʌ] (repeat 5x.)

Finally, combine the reversals into a single drill:

[θʌ ðʌ - ðʌ θʌ, fʌ vʌ - vʌ fʌ, sʌ zʌ - zʌ sʌ, ʃʌ ʒʌ - ʒʌ ʃʌ] (and repeat as often as you can bear it!)

Fricative sounds demand a little time to make them. As you work on these drills, be sure to allow each sound to take enough time without overdoing it.

• You can download this step of the warm-up in a condensed form which you can practice along with.

Next Step: Jawless Text