🥇 Week 3: Finalize, Test & Adjust

What a coincidence that Monday's assignment was  to try a full-range siren! In my voice lesson this morning , we actually added to the siren that I already had been doing (starting at a higher note and slowly gliding down to a low note in my chest voice). Today we added a glide back up to the top note as well. It was interesting changing this to a siren in both directions as I had worried that I wouldn't have the breath support to do this properly, but it worked quite well. Overall, I always enjoy the feel of sirens. It feels like a great way to explore my range and seems to gently orient me to any problem areas. When things are working well, it just feels quite nice on the voice overall. It just is a great way to get a session started and know what I am dealing with that day.

I also trying to siren both ways, as I’m usually ascending on those. I’ve been doing the same for sight singing to work on descending patterns as I have more trouble with those.

I ran my whole warm up routine and it took me about 15 minutes to do. I did a bit more in terms of the movement/postural work as I was fairly stiff this morning. I also did a bit more breathwork that my teacher wanted me to add on and also bidirectional sirens which I have not done in quite some time. Overall, I think that this warm up is good as long as some of the pieces are a bit more flexible. For example, today I did more stretching and movement than I typically need before I sing. This add almost 5 minutes to the routine. I think that on some days this could be shortened if my body is feeling well (or if it is after my usual Pilates session). The rest I think feels pretty good most of the time and I do think that a warm up of 10-15 minutes feels appropriate.

After running my warm up today, I feel like some of the initial body work can be edited down when I am having a good day. This can get the total warm up to about 10 minutes total which I feel is more practical on a regular basis. I also feel like on the days that I need more body work that I might be able to reduce the breath work a bit so that the warm up is not so long. I feel like the absolutely essential parts for me would be one postural exercise, one breath exercise, sirens and then lip trill work (usually a penta scale up with a lip trill and then repeat with full voice). I feel like everything else is modular and can be added and taken away based on 1. how I am feeling and 2. how much time I have.

I ran my full warm-up minus the physical prep (because I had taught a group fitness class beforehand) prior to the TB recital this morning. It took around 10 minutes. I think it worked well. The one thing I would change would be a moment to find a feeling of groundedness. I did my warm-up while walking through the house getting things done, and taking a moment to feel my feet solidly on the ground would have been good!

Today I ran my warm up and decreased the amount of stretching and postural work a bit. This helped to keep the total routine to about 10 minutes. This felt much more manageable for me. I did feel quite ready to progress into my technical work and repertoire. I started off with some gentle neck mobility work and followed this with a breathing exercise that my voice teacher has me do that uses unvoiced fricatives and movements to connect the breath more fully with the diaphragm. I then moved into doing another movement based exercise from my teacher that has an arm swing and knee bend with the word "Ho" as the knees bend and the arms come forward. This repeats for 3 repetitions before you finish with a long held sung "Ho" where the arms come up overhead and slowly come down as you finish the held note. This then gets repeated a few times moving the pitch up by 1/2 a step each time. Finally, I did a lip trill penta scale followed by a sung penta scale. Today I used "Ah" as the vowel, but I rotate this from day to day and sometimes change it in different places in my range. This portion of the warm up is where I try to explore my full range. I think that this final portion is the part that I will always do. I think I can change/rotate the stretching and postural work and even the breath work depending on what I feel like I need in a given day.

I ran through my warm-up again today, this time at the piano (after the physical part). It works really well for me, and I allow myself the flexibility to spend a little more time on certain parts of it as needed. It again took about 10 minutes.

I'll always do some breath work (today: leaky tire, then leaky tire with a little phonation on a do to sol and back down x 3 on one breath, then tongue trill siren). After the physical prep, this is the most important part for me. I think the next part of the warm up will depend on what we've done in lesson that week and what my teacher has suggested for me. 

I feel like after running my warm up now several times that I have created something that really works well for my voice. Having "modular" aspects in the beginning to address posture and breath seems to work well for me. This does lead to a variable time commitment in the warm up, but I am good with that. The part that I think needs to be fixed for me is the true phonation aspects such as sirens and lip trills. And, if time is really short, I do think that this could even suffice if need be. For now, this flexibility seems to meet my needs. I do think as I get more experience that what I do in my warm up might evolve. For now, I am happy that I took the last few weeks to really think about and investigate what works and does not work for me.