Join me this week as a share a quick and effective 5-minute vocal warm-up you can do right in your car.
Perfect for those on-the-go moments before a gig, rehearsal, or audition, this routine requires no instruments and minimal thought, allowing you to focus on the road while preparing your voice. With exercises designed to connect your breath, relax your vocal folds, and lock in resonance, you'll arrive ready to perform at your best.
🚘 Tune in and make the most of your drive time!
00:00 Introduction to Vocal Warmups
02:05 Vocal Breath Exercise
03:14 SOVT Exercise
05:11 Extended Tongue and Floppy Jaw Exercises
06:43 Resonance Exercise
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I feel like vocal warmups can cause a lot of stress for singers that is completely unnecessary. I think the stress is if I don't warm up, I'm a lousy singer, which of course is not true, though I do highly recommend some kind of warmup because it just gets your voice and your body ready for more athletic activity. Or it's the stress of I don't really know what to do. Should I do 30 minutes? Should I do five minutes? I don't have any time before my gig.
I have to drive there for two hours. Like it just stresses people out because they feel like I should do it. I don't really know what I can do that's gonna make a difference in the time I have in the way that I'm able to do it. So that's what today's episode is all about. I wanna give you a quick five minute maximum vocal warmup that you can do in your car because I realize, no, of course that's not ideal. We would all love to be able to get to a gig.
at least an hour early, right after sound check and lounge in this wonderful green room and stretch our body and do all of these great things. And I hope you get the opportunity to have those times, but I don't care how high level you are. We don't get those times always, right? I wish we did, but sometimes it's like, hey, you're on in 10 and you like just got out of a van or just got from the plane to the car or whatever it is,
to jump in and sing. so ideally the time that you had to work out your voice is that drive time.
So this is just gonna be four different exercises, four different things you can do in the car without a lot of thought because for heaven's sakes, I want your eyes and brain on the road. Don't hurt yourself, y'all. I will be traumatized. So safety first, of course, but none of these take an instrument. They don't take you doing anything besides looking at the road, focusing on what you have to do, and stretching out and working your voice a little bit. So the first thing we're gonna do is some breathing.
One, it can be really great for kind of lowering nerves, centering into the body, grounding into the body before performance. It's also great for connecting to effective breath for our singing, getting that breath management and that body and that voice aligned right from the get-go. And the thing I recommend is to blow the air out of your lungs, to sip in for whatever count feels good for you, and don't worry about precise count.
But let's say inhaling for a count of eight and you're going to sip just like you're sipping a spaghetti noodle.
And then you're going to exhale on a hiss, an S, at least double. So for 16, I'm not gonna do it for 16. I'll spare you all, but.
for double whatever that first count is. Doesn't have to be perfect, We're just gonna go for the inhale and exhale as long as we can. A few of those can be done in a minute maybe and make your body feel, allow your body to feel more relaxed, the breath more connected to the body, the body more connected to the voice, so that then we can go to exercise number two. Some kind of semi-occluded vocal tract sound.
and exercise. So
semi-occluded vocal tract, a fancy pants way of saying a partially closed mouth. Our mouth is the end of our vocal tract. Examples of that are like a lip trill. An H N nice and easy. Like you're saying hun, but you're going to take that vowel out. a totally nasal, really nice buzzy sound.
a V, like the word van, but you're gonna hold it. Whatever feels good for you, I love a raspberry too, that's with the tongue out. And don't worry about if I just gave you ones and you're like, I don't like any of those. None of those feel good for me. Do what works for you always. So any SOVT, and you can either take that on sliding intervals, doesn't have to be exact, but meaning if you're a person that can hear those intervals,
Let's say it's the interval of a fifth. And I just work that up as high as it feels comfy and as low as it feels comfy. If you're like, Amber, my brain does not hear those intervals. Totally fine. Just do varying levels of vocal sirens.
So a vocal siren is just letting your voice stretch from low to high and back down. So you can do a small one, a medium sized one, a large one, back down to medium to smaller so it can just sound like...
you
Right? Just some sirens. A minute of that. That's all you need. What that does, that semi-occluded vocal tract sound gets those vocal folds connected, set up as ideally as they can be, stretching, more blood flow to the vocal folds, nice breath management.
So that's exercise number two. Exercise number three, some kind of articulator, either stretch or exercise. That could be as simple as, ⁓ I'm extending my tongue, right? I don't wanna hyper-extend it, but I'm just stretching that tongue, letting it fully cover my bottom lip, whatever it looks like for you.
Again, I'm just doing some vocal sirens on the gorgeous a sound, So whether you do that, whether you do a little bit of a scale, a triad.
that tongue extended. I also have an exercise I love that looks goofy as all get out while you're driving, but who really cares because it's effective. You're gonna extend your tongue just relaxed out and you're gonna just move your jaw. So actually let me clarify that. You're not really extending the tongue. You're just relaxing the tongue. I always tell people think like you're gonna be hit by Novocaine when you go to go to the dentist and they go to numb things up and you just kind of can't really feel your tongue. It's just sort of like relaxed
It's that kind of tongue position. And then you just move the jaw. And I get asked all the time what vowel sound is that. You guys, it's blah, blah, blah, right? It's floppy jaw. It's a relaxed tongue. we're not really thinking about a perfect vowel. We're getting those articulators woken up.
ready to go, hopefully releasing a little bit of tension with the floppy jaw, we are uncoupling them. So it's the jaw working without the tongue that is our exercise number three. We've got our articulators ready to go. And our exercise number four is to lock in your resonance strategy. That is where you want to kind of feel the sound and the tone quality you're going for when you're going to perform. For me, and I think for most contemporary commercial singers,
It is going to be somewhere forward, Popping right out of our face, right out of our mouth. So I like to use a consonant-vowel combo. You can do whatever feels good for you, but I find forward consonants where you are articulating. How funny. I had a hard time articulating that word. But where you are really articulating with the tip of the tongue, teeth, and lips, So.
Consonants like W, W W W W W W W, like ⁓ and N, my my my my my, na na na na na, na na na na na, forward consonants and then any kind of a bright.
vowel shape and you're going to modify depending on you. If you are somebody who tends to go pretty dark and really kind of drop and round and you know you need to balance that out, you're going to go brighter. You might do nae nae nae nae nae nae or fee fee fee fee fee fee fee fee fee an F consonant that is teeth right on the lips, hard to get more forward than that and a bright E vowel. For any of us that already lean towards that bright way and maybe you know that you can get a little squeezy in the jaw, the E vowel shape
Probably not your friend. You want to do more of like an ⁓ and ⁓ Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-what. Just those four exercises. You can do easily in your car.
you are getting grounded into your body, connecting into your breath, lowering some nerves if we need to do that. We are getting the vocal folds connected, set up ideally and optimally and stretching with our SOVT.
We are getting our articulators ready to go, releasing a little tension, and then we are locking in our resonance strategy so that our voice feels good and sounds how we want it to sound when we jump into our gig. Warmups do not have to be a big ordeal. It is about quality, not about quantity. And yes, if you have time to stretch the body and sing along to a track or have a piano, fantastic, but you don't have to have those things
to still get a good warmup in. And warming up in the car in five minutes is far, far better than skipping the warmup and doing nothing at all because you think you just don't have the time. Or you aren't quite sure what's gonna be most effective.
hope this is helpful to all of you listening and I hope that you will incorporate some kind of warm up. into your routine.
Like always, I have a bunch of freebies for you all. Two weeks free in my vocal pro membership, a free vocal training all about movement, 25 different movement tools. And you can book a free 15 minute consultation with me or my fab associate coach, Eva Cassel all down in the show notes below. Happy singing everybody and see you in the next episode.
