I'd like you to play with your voice in this step, and use the upper (falsetto, for men) range, where the sound vibrates in your head. The sound you will make is similar to the sound of the coyote falling off a cliff in the old Road Runner cartoons, like this. [Note that this sound is only an example — it's not meant as a model for you to copy.] Start fairly high up, so that you're in your head voice/falsetto, and slowly start to slide down on an "EE" (IPA [i] ) vowel. I can't stress enough how important it is to go slowly through your voice, and that, if your voice is prone to "cracking" as you shift registers, you should slow down as you approach those areas of your range. When you run out of breath, stop the tone, breathe down into your core, and continue the slide downward from the pitch where you left off. If you can, try to stay in your head tone/falsetto; don't switch into chest resonance. You'll get into a place in your voice that is not very effective for speaking, one that sounds rather odd and breathy, and your voice will want to switch into chest tone. Don't let it!

After one downward slide, you'll want to do another one, starting one note higher up that the previous slide. Continue to slide down through your range, working up higher and higher, note by note. Always remember to breathe when you need to, to go very slowly, and never to lift your chin or head as you "reach" for the next note in the sequence.

Resonance-wise, you should be feeling buzziness in your head and in your face, and your goal is to enhance that feeling as best you can. Experiment with your tongue placement so that your head buzzes as much as possible.

Next Step: Head-Jaw Relationship

For this step in the Intermediate Warm-up Series, we’ll be working our way down in your range, warming up the middle of your voice, down to the depths. As always, you should work with gentle ease in this exploration, not pushing or forcing your voice as your work your way down.

At the heart of this step is a gentle, sliding sigh.

[If you don't have much experience with voice work, you'll need to take an extra step here, and visit the Sighing Down page for instructions on how to breathe and sigh from your core, rather than from your chest. This is an essential bit of information, and if you don't have it, off you go now, and come back when you've done it. Off you go now!]

If you’ve just come back, or if you already knew how to sigh from your core, let’s get back to that sigh. The idea in this step of the warm-up is to sigh downward, starting from somewhere around the middle of your range. If you’d like to follow along with some pitches, so that you’re sure to work through your full range, follow along with this audio file. The idea is to slide/glissando your sigh between the two pitches, which are an octave apart. Start on the high pitch, and slide down through your range to the lower note.

Let’s start out with a hum, sliding down on /mmmmm/. Then we’ll open up the sound on “huh,” (IPA [hʌ]) and finally we’ll try it out on “hey,” (IPA [heɪ].)

As always, our goal isn’t lovely singing. The goal is to feel our way through the sounds, vibrating the sound as best we can. You want to feel the sound in your face, throat, and as we go lower, in your chest. As you slide downward, you should feel the sensation of the vibration moving downward, too. It’s great if you can think of this as an additive process, trying to maintain the sensation you have in your face as you add the vibrations in the lower part of your body.

If you’re new to this, you may need to go slower than the recording. You can follow the recording if you hit the pause button and give yourself time to slide down through the octave. The point is to make it smooth, not jumpy or uneven. For some people, sliding through the pitches is very hard, because they want to jump from the higher pitch to the lower pitch. Perhaps it might be helpful to think of this as a siren, rather than like singing notes. Remember to sigh, rather than sing. If you don’t hit the “note” at the bottom of the octave, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t a test!

One last thing: on a sustained sigh like this, it can be easy to become obsessed with the sound of your voice, rather than the feeling of it, or an idea of what you might be saying with the sigh. Give yourself an image, think a thought, release how you’re feeling through the sigh, so that you put part of yourself into the sound. In other words, say something.

• This post is also available in a simpler,condensed form audio file, so you can practice the exercise without any explanation.

Next Step: Jaw Swinging

In this step of the Basic Warm-up Series, you’ll gently explore your vocal range by sliding through triads on the notes do, mi and sol.

Beginning any exercise that requires intervals, or a series of pitches with fairly accurate relationships between notes, means you have to come up with some way to describe what that music sounds like. The three notes of the first three lines of “Rock Around the Clock” are the notes doh, mi and sol. In the key of C, they would be C, E and G, making a major C triad. The same three notes begin “Mich-ael Row your boat ashore, Alleluia! ”

Women | Men
(Women’s voices are naturally about an octave higher than men’s)

For those of you with singing background, you’ll probably immediately recognize this as one of the most common voice exercises around. In this case, we’re not going to be very careful to sing the note, as we’re focusing on speaking voice. We want to give ourselves permission to be a little sloppy and slide up and down through the pitches, and not feel like we have to land very accurately on each note. It’s important that after each group of notes (or triad) up and down, we take a little time to breathe, letting that easy, comfortable inhalation fill down into our bellies. After each triad, we’ll go up a semi-tone until we get to a fairly high pitch, that should warm up the typical speaking range of most people. (Note that some people are capable of going much higher than the range we’re working here. The goal is an easy, gentle warm-up, not an aggressive, competitive voice battle!)

Remember to slide through the pitches, and not focus on singing the notes: sigh your way through the notes, and be sure to think thoughts as you go, such as “where do I feel the vibration from this?” or “can I relax my jaw more?”

So beginning on the B flat below middle C (an octave lower for men), we’re going to work our way up to the G major chord. You can either do this on a hum (mmmmm), or you can do it on any open vowel. I’d start with “Uh,” the vowel in “love, mother, or cup”. Other sounds to explore: “hey”, “hoe”, “hah”, or “hee”.

You can follow along with the piano here:

Next Step: Jaw Basics