Vocal Warm Ups - What's their importance?
When you are singing you are using the your vocal chords and the inner muscles of your larynx (the muscle that controls your vocal chords opening and closing to let out a sound). We need to stretch these muscle before we attempt any real singing, just like you would warm up before you go for a run or play sports. This allows them to become lose and can also gets rid of any mucous and can also reduce the risk of having an injury, such as losing your voice. It is recommended to warm up for 15-20 minutes before hand, to wakeup your chords, and get the blood pumping around them.
The ideal warm up would be to start off with something small, that doesn't add to much strain to your voice, for example what we did in this warm up was begin with gentle lip trills and humming. and then slowly as you feel even more prepared, you can start to produce some more natural sounds that let more air flow over your vocal chords, for example in our warm up we tend to start with simple sounds, like Ahhh and Oooo going up and down a scale or arpeggios. Then as we progress it is good to make it even more complex, by adding in words over the top. For an example tongue twisters, which get your mouth moving to get your mouth muscles moving and warmed up.
Also vocal warm up can also develop your voice further, while as helping with the general upkeep of your voice, just like a bike chain would need oil to keep it moving. For myself I have found that by exploring different warm ups that suit my voice and me as a singer, I have heightened my range, and I can now reach higher notes with more confidence that I could, before I started to explore and warm up my voice regularly.
Song Session - How is it Valuable
In our first rehearsal back we began the lesson by just standing around the piano and singing some of the songs from the score of our first performance, which is We Will Rock You! After doing a thorough warm up, we began to sing some of the songs in unison, and just exploring what everyone knew and could do to bring to the songs. As this was our first lesson of the term, and was a new class of performers, there are some people in the class that have not worked together yet, and nobody has as a collective yet.
When we all first entered the room I felt that we did not yet have that connection as a cast, and where not 100% on how everyone performs and works in a rehearsal. I felt that the moment that we all started to sing together, there was an automatic connection, that we all blended our voices well together and listened out for others, when we were singing.
Basic Harmonies
When we started this lesson we all set ourselves goals for this year, I felt that I wanted to learn more about the technique of singing, as I know how to singing certain things, but don't always know why I'm doing something.
In the first section of the singing period we learn what a basic harmony was, and it was explained to us in the form of the chord A, and that the bottom note was a A and then every other note from there on was the harmony line.
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