This month I am going to begin an extended series about warming up your voice before a rehearsal, audition, recording session or performance; caring for your voice during that time and warming down afterwards. These are really three separate aspects and each will be dealt with individually.

In my article entitled "The Validity Of Vocalizing," I talked about the importance of warming up but I did not actually give anyone specific things to do. I'd now like to get into that in more detail by outlining a procedure that I have found to be extremely effective for enhancing performance.

You must first realize that the larynx is governed by the same principles regardless of the situation -be it a rehearsal or a performance. To the larynx, singing is singing and rehearals count just as much as anything else. I know that many singers do not believe that preparation is necessary but it is my experience that that approach is ineffective at best. I feel that singers who do not prepare are short-changing themselves. After all, given the fact that the larynx is a muscles group, it is reasonable to assume that it needs the same sort of preparation that any other part of the body would need in order to perform a complex muscular function. So, assuming that we all accept the premise that warming up is beneficial, where do we begin?

Let's start with warming up for a rehearsal, a time when a singer is likely to do an enormous amount of singing. Say your rehearsal is in the evening. If you are a professional musician you may not have a daytime commitment and therefore will have time during the day to prepare. However, if you work 9 to 5, this leaves you with almost no time to get ready. Since it would be impossible to tailor this article to each of your individual needs, I will explain what the ideal would be and you can adapt it until you have devised a program that works for you.

If your rehearsal is at 7:00, you should be done warming up your voice by 5:00. (You should also already have done some sort of physical exercise even if it was only mild stretching.) Your vocal workout should be proportioned to the length of your rehearsal. For example, if your rehearsal is three hours long, you cannot do a long warm up -by 'long' I mean an hour or more. For a three hour rehearsal, a half an hour of warm up is a safe amount of time. It will allow your muscles to get ready without overtaxing your strength or using up all your energy. Of course there are always exceptions. You may need more or less time to feel prepared. As you continue to explore this process your own individual needs will become more and more evident. If you do work 9 - 5, try singing in intervals of a few minutes on and off all day until you've totaled a half an hour. This way no one will suspect what you are up to and you will be working in a very healthy way. Even if you do not work 9 - 5, this is an excellent way to work your voice.

After this vocalizing is finished, rest your voice. Eat something for dinner but make sure that you give yourself enough time to allow for proper digestion. Your food should be serving you as fuel by the time your rehearsal begins so that you get the most nutritional value. Shortly before you are going to sing, do another set of exercises -nothing strenuous. Keep them light and easy; just enought to get the leftover food particles and mucous off and away from the larynx. Sing easily, with no great effort, for only about 5 minutes just to re-warm the muscles. And always leave a little bit of time (a few minutes) before you begin to sing seriously at rehearsal.

An important thing to keep in mind is that it is never wise to warm up using a tremendous amount of volume. There are some people that advocate singing loudly but I disagree with that theory. There are, of course, some exercises to develop volume, but as a general rule, soft is safer and far more effective. Moderate singing allows the muscles the space to warm up gently without straining.

Once you have completed those couple of minutes before rehearsal, you should find that your body and your voice are ready to go. If you feel stiff even then, start stretching your body to see if you have tightened up since your original workout. If you didn't get a chance to do your work out earlier, now is an ideal time to stretch and stimulate your muscles.

Rehearsals usually demand an enormous amount of repetition and that is tiring. Remember -do not sing when the other musicians are cutting parts unless it is absolutely necessary. That is one of the easiest ways to tire your voice that I know of. Since you will be repeating things anyway, save your strength whenever you can. The general rule is: the more actual singing you need to do, the more regulated your warm up should be.

The warm up procedure is the same for a performance and for an audition, although rehearsals and performances are more strenuous. In an audition, you may only get to sing one song, or maybe half a song. Since you want to be very warmed up in order to do your best, the trick is to warm up your body. Yes, even more than your voice. Of course you must do vocal exercises, but during an audition you don't get the same chance to warm up the body that you would during a normal rehearsal or performance. To balance that out, do a lot of aerobic exercise the day of the audition or even the day before. Running is the cheapest and most available of those aerobic exercises. In the very cold weather you can jump rope or jump on a rebounder. If your body is ready your vocal warm up will be much more effective.

In a recording session you are faced with an entirely different situation. You may have a recording session scheduled to begin at 6:00 PM and you may not get to sing until 1:00 AM. In this case, follow the time schedule that I laid out for practicing during the day. Try to guage when you will be singing so that you can rest your voice for an hour or two between warm up and recording. Sometimes sessions go on all night. Make sure you eat well and keep drinking plenty of fluids.

The exercises you do should be moderate and not too loud. Begin by working in a small range of pitch, preferably on one pitch, and then work your way to scales. Don't go too far or too high at first. When listening to the sound, remember that you are warming up and allow your voice to come to you. Once you are a little warmed up you can then do exercises which have full scales and skips. Make sure that you gradually increase the range that you cover and work your way to a more extended work out.

Do not push your voice at the beginning of a work out in an effort to make it sound good. Rather, listen to the scales quietly and gently so that you can determine what state you are in. While you listen, you may hear that your voice is very raspy or nasal or stuck, etc. By listening you can begin to judge what you will need to do in the way of vocalizing. If you have no training and no information about this subject, consider acquiring information that will allow you to doctor yourself. If you have a teacher, look over the exercises that you have been given. Arrange your warm up so that it is a gradual process that allows you to get to the point where you are ready to begin but not all played out. Drink only room temperature or hot fluids and make sure you are well rested and well stretched.

I feel that these few hints will be quite valuable for you as you prepare. I plan to continue talking about this in following articles so that you have a complete picture of how to go about this. See you next month.