Transcript
Hi. I’m Anya Singleton. We’re going to talk about some voice techniques for women.
I think the most important thing before you even sing a note is to get your breathing in place, if you’re going to sing. The thing that people struggle with the most is running out of air and straining. If you’re straining, that means you’re not supporting yourself enough, and that’s a very common thing to do.
What I like to do before I even start is do a couple of breathing exercises to get us ready. I know we’re going to address that in another segment, so for right now, let me just give you some things to relax and loosen up a little bit. We’ll be doing a lot of singing a little bit later on.
I think the first thing to do is to get your body relaxed. Do some shoulder rolls. Let your head relax. Do some nice head rolls. The important thing when you’re doing a head roll is to make sure that your shoulder doesn’t travel with it. You want to keep this area nice and loose. Then another thing that I like to do is roll down the spine and roll back up, letting your head be the last thing to come up. What this does is it allows your entire rib cage to relax, and actually, also loosens up your shoulders and your back. When we hold a breath when we’re singing, the most common thing people do is that they pull up with their shoulders and they forget to breathe. This stops you from doing that.
A great thing to do too, is once you’ve got the breathing in place and you feel connected, you can add a hum, and then a siren to loosen up. You can roll down, making sure you’re not tensing up the throat. Then you’re going to roll back up. Perfect. That way, everything is loose, the throat is relaxed. You’ll hear the difference if I do it with a closed throat. You’ll hear . . . You can hear how strained that is and it’s tight. You want to keep it nice and loose. You want to think about even though your lips are closed, that there’s still space inside your mouth so that you can breathe easily. That’s a great way to start preparing for singing. It’s a great way before you even begin the voice techniques, lay down the foundation.
One other thing to think about, and this is mental thing to think about when you’re prepping to sing, and we all do this, it’s easy to put a lot of very high expectations on yourself. Let’s say that you want to learn a specific song and you like how the original person sang it, and you really want to sing like that. Remember, it’s really about pacing yourself, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. I think, enjoy the singing .If you do that, you’ll relax a lot more and your singing will be better.
