Singing Warm Up: No Piano Follow Along

1. Intro course video: Hey everyone, my name is Adam Michelle. I'm a singer-songwriter and vocal coach. And so why should you be listening to me? Well, I have a YouTube channel with over 400 thousand subscribers as of right now. And I got there by first posting a video that shows how I went from this to this. Who better to teach you how to sing? Then somebody who started with no singing ability and was able to learn how to sing throughout my over 15 year journey of learning how to sing and improving my voice. I've learned all of the different techniques out there and I've applied the ones that work the best for my students have for myself. So that is exactly what you're going to learn here, here in this class. You're going to follow along with me moment by moment and we're going to run through exercises that are going to get you using your voice better, using it more effectively and warming it up, getting it ready for singing. Now, part of this course is that I want you to record the entire process. So before you hit the play button to the next video, why you just set up your camera on your smartphone videoing yourself so that you can see exactly what you're doing. Then what I want you to do is post that up to the discussion area so that other students can comment on your exercises and progress over time. So you can do this multiple times with every day that you do it and you'll notice improvements as you work through these exercises. Now, my goal with these follow along courses is to do it in a very fun and engaging way so that you're not following just some boring piano scale. You're following along with me one-on-one. We're making weird sounds, were having a good time. So I'm really excited for you guys to start. And if you like this course, please jump over to my website where you're going to see way more resources on learning it is saying and improving your voice. So check that out at www dot am vocal studios.com without further ado. Let's go to the next video. 2. Slide explanation: And slides. Slides are essentially moving from one pitch slowly to another pitch. So we could do random slides like we're moving from an undefined pitch to another undefined pitch. This is good when you don't have a piano or around because you can just slide around and it doesn't really matter your starting point or your endpoint. It's all about moving slowly from one pitch to another. Now the main pitfalls with slides for most people, number one, moving too quickly from the note you're starting on to the note your ending on, a lot of people will go and they'll get a jump from one to the other things to watch out with this is that a lot of people, when they think of slowing down the slide, especially when I'm in a lesson, I'm telling them slow down that slide. What they'll do is they'll just hold out the bottom note for longer and hold-out the top note for longer, but not actually extend that middle range while you'll hear is blue and they'll hold it out or did I slow it down? No. No, You didn't. We want to slow the in-between place between those two notes. The reason why slides are so beneficial for the voice is because the voice makes small incremental shifts to be able to make the adjustments that they need on every single pitch within every single note as well. That helps you to identify any spots where your voice might be going awry. So if we go and your voice is cracking right at that point, you can then try to hone in on that specific spot and fix it. So one of the best ways to get over the issue of not making that transition gentle and gradual from one node to the other is to actually think of yourself as an ambulance siren. You think of an ambulance siren, you'll very easily be able to find that gradual movement from one note to the other because that's essentially what a siren is to moving gradually from one note to another. Another way to think about it is if you remember when you were a kid and you're watching the coyote and the roadrunner when the coyote Yo to walk off the cliff and then realize that he was standing in midair. He would then go, it would hit the bottom. And so that drop is a glissando or a slide from one note to the other. So let's go through a slide workout routine right now together. 3. Puffy cheeks - slides: The first thing that I would do and you don't have to stick with the pitches that I'm hitting. You can go within your comfortable range, but the first thing I would do is the puffy cheeks. So we're going to puff out our cheeks. Try to move through your whole range with that. Right there I noticed a few crinkles in the sound. So what I want to do is undo those crinkles. And I think part of it is a little bit of flam it is early in the morning for me so that I'm getting some morning voice right now. So we've got to kind of work through that, but let's do it again. Really think of moving slowly through your range. 4. Puffy cheeks - the hills: Once you've done that two or three times, then we can do what I like to call the hills. What we're doing is actually doing some quick slides from one note to another and then stopping, dropping a little bit and then scooping up again. So it's kind of like scoops. This really helps with finding a lot of release in your higher notes. So the more you're able to find that nice, clean glissando up into your higher range, the easier that part of your range will become. Once we're done doing that, we can do the opposite way in a glissando. Slide down it again and again. 5. Lip roll - slides: Good. Now we're gonna try with liberal. Liberal again from bottom to top, but a little bit. And again, keeping nice and slow. Another thing this helps with is extending your breath management so that you're able to manage the breath that you take in for longer. The longer you hold out that slide, the better your breath management is. But a little bit last one, but a little bit. 6. Lip roll - the hills: Now let's do the hills. But again, but another thing that this helps with is engaging your support. So what you'll notice is every time you do a hill you're going to feel your support squeeze your lower abs, your pelvic floor in your lower back. But now let's do some top-down slides. 7. "NG" slide: Now let's get even closer to singing with an NG sound. So we're going to do an NG at the end of Sing, Sing. And then we're going to hold that in slide through our range. There are noticing a little bit of a crack on the way down. So what we want to do is slow that down by slowly going over that crack over and over and over again. I'm slowly smoothing it out. So let's do that again. And again. We slowly smooth that out so you might find that you're breaking or cracking in different areas, try to slowly go through it and smoothing that out. 8. French "on" slide: Next what we're gonna do is open the mouth. Our gonna do an all as in a French ON ALL, all. This is an extension of the NG. It's moving to an open mouth situation, but with the back of the tongue rising in the back of the mouth and the soft palate dropping down. So what we're gonna do is that all on a slide off. Now my voice is cracking a little bit on the way down. So what I want to do is do a quieter we're going to go. There were finding that slow, gentle adjustment that we want to make. Now let's try with the hills. All. We slowly want to engage our lower abs to be able to find those hills as we do it. So that is a good example of a basic workout routine. When it comes to slides, you don't have to stick with exactly what I did. You can always throw in any exercise that you enjoy into that mix.