As 2024 comes to a close, I’m celebrating by sharing some of my all-time favorite vocal exercises with you! 🎶 These are the go-to gems I turn to again and again to help singers keep their voices strong, flexible, and healthy—whether you're preparing for a performance, warming up for a practice session, or just staying in vocal shape over the holidays.
In this episode of Vocal Tips in 10, I break down why each exercise works, what vocal goal it supports, and how to use them effectively as part of your regular warm-up or workout routine. These tools are simple, powerful, and perfect for setting your voice up for success as we head into 2025.
I’ll be taking a short break to enjoy the holidays, but I’ll be back in the new year with even more tips and tools to help you evolve your voice and artistry.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
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Hello singers and welcome to the final episode of Vocal Tips in 10 for the year of 2024. I'm Amber Mogg Cathey and if you are listening to this in any kind of real time, the holidays are coming up and then the new year is coming up. So this is the last episode for the year. Next Wednesday, which is when these episodes come out, is Christmas Day. Hooray! I love Christmas. And the following Wednesday is New Year's Day.
So I thought I would end out this year with an episode sharing some of just my absolute favorite exercises for singers. These are a few of my favorite things. I'm going to jump in and just share a handful of them with you, hoping that you can play with these in your own voice to give you some tools to finish out the year and then start the next year just as successfully as you can. a number of these are semi-occluded vocal tract exercises.
So let me just really quickly say what that means for people that don't know. We love, I feel like in the voice world, to make things sound far more difficult and far more fancy than they really need to be. Semi-occluded means partially closed. And the end of your vocal tract is your mouth. And your vocal tract is just a tube that starts right above the vocal folds and ends at the mouth. And how we shape that tube really dramatically determines where and how our sound comes out. The vocal tract is just...
a huge part of our singing. You can have golden vocal folds, but without a vocal tract, they would not do you any good. So the end of the vocal tract is your mouth. So it means a semi-occluded, a partially closed mouth, that tube, that vocal tract closed in some way. and what's great about these exercises is that partial closure creates a little bit of pressure on top of the vocal folds to kind of balance out that pressure underneath the vocal folds from our lungs.
the air that fuels our sound, and that just helps the vocal folds set up kind of as ideally as possible. When that happens, then many times tension surrounding them or things that might be kind of tightening up to try and compensate for something a little wonky at the vocal fold level, that tension can lessen and we just feel better. Things function better, we sound better. And a few of these that I'm going to share that are just my very favorites also have other great benefits. So let's jump into it. My very first
favorite exercise that I do on the daily. I call a blowfish. Some people call it puffy cheeks. Some people call it straw without a straw. It's those big puffy cheeks and a great way to try it out is to say a W like you're gonna say the what or water but you're gonna hold the W and never move to the vowel. What? Water. Just play with that. You'll feel buzz around your lips and your cheeks will puff out.
Here's some of the benefits of this exercise. In addition to the fact that it's a semi-occluded vocal tract exercise, so we know it sets up our vocal folds great, that puffiness in the cheeks helps stretch out and release tension in some of those facial muscles in the jaw. We can actually hold a lot of tension in the cheeks themselves. I love it for resonance, and I love yummy, buzzy resonance exercises.
So you can feel a lot of buzz around your lips. So it locks me into that forward resonance that I want to carry through into whatever I'm singing. And then it's also great for breath management. You can hear and see that breath flow. So a W is a great way to get into it. Another way to get into it is I like to use what I call the pinky trumpet or the thumb trumpet.
and don't overthink it. You're gonna pop your thumb or your pinky into your mouth loosely so you can still move it around and blow like you're playing a trumpet.
sometimes that can be helpful because it kind of gives you something to blow against and to resonate against. So I feel a lot of buzz on my pinky and on my thumb when I do this and I get those nice puffy cheeks. You can start out with your pinky or your thumb trumpet and then you can take them away when you no longer need them or if they're really beneficial, keep them in there. There's no negative to that. It's whatever feels good for you. But another great way to play with this is just to go in on that W and you're not moving to whatever the vowel sound is.
And then you can do this exercise and really any of the exercises I'm going to give you on any sliding interval scale pattern that you want. You can take it into songs. I love to take exercises that make me feel really good when I'm just working my voice into whatever song I'm working on because obviously that's what I really want is I want that end result to feel good and sound good, sound as great as possible. So I'm a sucker for sliding intervals and all that means interval is the distance between two pitches.
So you have a five note scale. A fifth is the one and the five. A fifth is a great way to go. And I love the slide because the slide is flexibility, the set pitches are control and control and flexibility in one exercise is amazing because that's what we really want in our singing. We want control so we're not pitchy, but we need flexibility. So we have freedom of tone and we can expand and stretch to our full range.
and really use our voice to its full capacity. So I can take that blowfish, put it on my sliding interval.
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I really focus on this just yummy, buzzy feeling around my lips, those nice puffy cheeks,
And then I can hear that nice buzz and that airflow too. So I love me a blowfish, puffy cheeks, straw without a straw, whatever you want to call it. Another SOVT that I love that really locks in resonance is what I call a smiley V. Again, you don't want to overthink this. You're just going to hold a V like you're saying the word van, but you're going to extend that V very. You're going to extend that V teeth.
on your lips, it's going to look different for everybody because we're all made differently. I've got big old teeth and big old lips. So I look like Bugs Bunny whenever I do this thing. And you want to feel that nice buzzy again, yummy resonance right on those lips. It's also great for airflow. I like to do it a little smiley because when I smile, I get these little pockets, these little openings on either side of my mouth that let that air flow through. And again, you can take this on a sliding interval. Here's an octave.
hear how buzzy that is on top? love it! Arpeggiate an octave. Whatever pattern you want, take it into songs. The other SOVT that I love seems so basic, but it's a hum with your tongue out. So you're just gonna go bleh. And when you go bleh, that tongue just relaxes onto your bottom lip. Everybody's looks different. And then you close your mouth.
and you hum. So it's a hum with your tongue out. I had a colleague and I would give them credit. I just don't remember who it was because it was years ago. Call it a tongue sandwich. And it's actually a very nice visual. The lips are your bread. I'm gluten free. So gluten free bread or your lettuce wrap or whatever you want. And your tongue is whatever you want to fill it with, whatever that yummy feeling is. So you make that tongue sandwich. What I love about this semi-occluded vocal tract exercise, the benefit for it is as I stretch that tongue a little bit, I'm getting some tension release at the root of the tongue.
also really opens up the vocal tract. And then again, it's so great for resonance. I can feel that buzz of my lips on my tongue.
Mmm
A hum with your tongue out, aka the tongue sandwich. And then I want to give you just kind of some of my favorite exercises, a quick favorite exercise for low end. And this isn't necessarily even a particular exercise. It's just a strategy I like, which is tying it in to speech. Hey, yo, take that into an exercise. Yo, yo, yo, or hey, hey.
Hey, really speechy. And what I like about that is it's a great way to connect to that true quote unquote chest voice, that thicker vocal fold function, which is what we want. We really want to work that shortening, thickening muscle. And for so many singers that have a tendency to have this disconnect between their speaking and their singing, they'll talk to me like normal and then they go to sing and kind of everything is disconnected and they feel like it's more difficult. It's because of this kind of mindset telling yourself that, no, these are two different things.
And I always like to remind people speaking and singing are the same thing. Just when we sing, we sustain pitches and we use a broader range of pitches.
Upper end, again, I'm a sucker for a sliding interval. I love just like a sliding third on a vocal siren and ooo vowel.
So just think, woo, just a siren like you're having fun, a sound you already know how to make, a fire truck, a car alarm, God forbid. And you're gonna put it in an interval that's just three notes apart.
And
For some people and for some styles so the one I've been loving for myself and the singers I'm working with is whoa whoa whoa like you're gonna say the word what and I add a little bit of vocal cry to it so again just feel like you're sad you're whiny you're mad I like to spread it out over an octave if I've got a singer who that's appropriate for
I like it because that W, you have to have airflow to make that W. You've got a bright vowel, but it's much more kind of dropped so you don't lose any kind of richness or depth of tone with it. And then the vocal cry really helps boost it. I know that's a bunch at once, but I hope these are helpful. These are some of my favorite vocal exercises that I've been using a lot here lately. I just wish you wonderful.
I wish you a happy new year and I hope I will see you back in two weeks for our first episode of 2025 on January 8th. Happy healthy singing everybody. Bye.
