Singing Exercises - Singing Exercises Tips To Improve Your Voice

Singing Exercises
Hi. Aaron here from HowtoSing.com and I want to talk for a minute about singing exercises.
Now I want to give you some great singing exercises, some that I think are some of the
best exercises. But I want to just talk briefly about your breath management system, your
breathing, because your breathing is so important and hey, the thing is kind of an overlooked
thing with beginner singers is if you're not breathing properly, then you're not doing
your singing exercises properly and then they're not having the benefit that they really, really
need to have.
So let me just talk just for a second about the breathing system and then the first couple
of exercises I want to give you have to do with they're more breathing-singing exercises
and the last ones are more of a I will get to it in a minute but you are actually using
your voice. It's a voice exercise but it's a voice exercise that will help you pace your
breathing which you want to do too.
So you've heard talk about singing from your diaphragm and I'm not going to go into the
whole singing from the diaphragm thing. You can watch my video on how to sing from your
diaphragm but basically in order to breathe properly, there are several schools of thought
but two main ones. There's the German school of thought. It's all about belly breathing.
You want to make sure that when you breathe in, your belly goes out and when you breathe
out, your belly goes in and the Italian, they have what's called the Appagio breathing method.
I mean who cares about the names of it but basically that is when you breathe in, it's
more it's still forward in the stomach, laterally in the stomach; but it's a little more in
the lower ribs and oblique area as well.
So me, I'm somewhere right in the middle. I'm a little more with the Italian sides but
the idea is basically that you're not either one basically says both of them say that you're
not supposed to raise your chest when you breathe in and lower it when you breathe out.
That's exactly what you don't want to do. You just want to make sure that the intake
of air expands the ribs and the stomach area and not the raising and lifting of your chest
because that actually blocks the amount of air that you can breathe in and that will
hinder you.
What you want is you want your chest pretty good about how I'm standing now, you want
your head, neck and torso pretty much aligned and you want your chest not high, not like
marching parade high. But you don't want to be slouched over because you're blocking the
air that you can intake in keeping your diaphragm from descending. Anyway, so that's enough
about all that.
Get a decent posture. Arms by the side. Relax like that and then your breathing system should
be make sure you're expanding there. Let's get to the actual exercises. This first one
is definitely it's directly related to your breathing. It's called the five-finger candle
exercise and so what this is doing is what you want to do is you want to connect your
breathing with your singing immediately. You don't want to be like, Haaahhh. A lot of people
have that, Haahh, haahh, until they get to that note. You want to be like, Ha! Ha! Ha!
You want immediate sound. You want that vocal closure immediately when you're singing so,
Aaahhh, instead of Haaa! You want that full sound there.
So this one, I hope you get the five-finger breathing exercise. You just take your five
fingers and as if they were candles on each finger, you should go [demonstrates breathing
exercise], as if you're blowing out five candles. Do that over and over and what you're kind
of wanting here is the next exercise is the panting exercise. It's kind of the same idea
is that you breathe in and you're expanding where I talked about in the sides of the stomach,
breathing in there. And then when you breathe out, you want to feel the air coming out and
connecting down here. You're not wanting to raise and lower the chest. So [demonstrates
breathing exercise]. You want an immediate connection with your breath and your singing.
So the other one is panting, something like that. Panting, you can kind of fill your stomach
and just like when you breathe in, make sure your stomach is coming out a little bit [demonstrates
breathing exercise] and when you breathe out, your stomach is going in a bit or your sides
are going in a bit at least. And this is the idea of connecting your breathing and making
sure you're breathing from your diaphragm and not just like, Eh, eh, eh, eh, singing
from your throat, Ah, ah! You want to, Ha! Ha! Ha! You want to sing with full resonance
and full power. That's singing from your diaphragm.
The last one is a tongue trail. A tongue trail is like an extended rolling of the Rs, like
not obviously in English but in Latin-American languages, the Spanish a lot. Rrr-icardo or
whatever, rolling your Rs. That's the tongue trail. In this one, you can do the tongue
trail in like one, two, three, two, one [demonstrates rolling of the Rs] and raise it [demonstrates
rolling of the Rs] and continue to raise it and it will help kind of expand your range
there as well.
And then it's a great breathing exercise because what it does, the tongue the way it does that,
it actually takes the weight off the vocal chords which is good. But it also paces the
breath as it comes out [demonstrates rolling of the Rs] kind of that starting and stopping
of the breath as it comes out and paces it which is teaching you proper breathing and
you're not even having to think about it. It's just part of the exercise.
So you do the one, two, three, two one and then you can do the [demonstrates rolling
of the Rs]. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one and you keep expanding it
and that will help you to kind of get a nice, good breath and be able to pace the air as
it comes out.
So there are a couple of singing exercises for you. Like I said, I'm at HowtoSing.com.
You can check it out, the link below. It's HowtoSing.com. Just type in HowtoSing.com.
I've got a bunch of other tips and tricks and articles and all kinds of great resources
for you and I actually just put up a video, one of how to sing higher notes.
It's about a 10-minute plus video or something like that. I can't remember but How to Sing
High Notes got some great tips and tricks that the pros use and particularly how to
sing high notes without all the strain. A lot of times when you're singing high notes,
you get that strain because you raise your larynx, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, HowtoSing.com, check that out. Hope this was helpful.