Making Up Vocal Warmups
When I was directing my small church choir in Colorado I had a student from the local college come to observe my rehearsal. I am a big believer in making practicum hours actually practical, so toward the end of my warmup time I told him to come up and do one. He stammered that I had done all the ones that he’d learned in class. I told him to just pick a vowel and a note pattern and do something. Doesn’t have to be complicated. There are countless books and blog posts and other resources that give excellent examples of vocal warmups. While they are all good to have and a variety of exercises should be used to discourage complacency, we have built up a bit of mystique about choral warmups. I’ve heard so many teachers and clinicians say that you should adapt warmups to parallel the literature you’re working on. It also seems like there is an unwritten expectation that “good” choral directors and voice teachers have an endless supply of warmups and no two rehearsals should have the same ones. That is a daunting concept, and not everyone has time to write custom warmups to the literature or learn seven new warmups every day.
When I told that practicum student to just pick a vowel and a note pattern I wasn’t kidding. That is really the essence of making up vocal warmups. There are basically three components to each warmup exercise – pitch, consonant, and vowel. By mixing and matching there can be endless combinations. To take some of the mystery out of things let’s start with pitch.
There are three basic patterns that I teach all my voice and piano students that almost all of the warmups you see in the books are based on (Figures 1-3):
With these three patterns the sky is the limit, because each of these can be modified and combined in several ways, for example:
Yes, you should also have some that span at least an octave, but the same principle applies there. Using different vowels, consonants, and rhythms with these three patterns and the simple one octave scale and arpeggio gives you plenty of material to use.
Once you have your pitch pattern, just pick a vowel. Ah is usually a good one to start with, and to switch too at the extreme ends of the range. You can also play around with switching vowels, either between iterations of the exercise or somewhere in the middle of each one. Have them sing a simple scale on “ee” on the way up, and switch to “ah” on the way down (Figure 6).
Deciding how you want to handle the articulation is the next step – and that’s where consonants come in. Vocalists use the tongue, teeth, lips, and jaw (collectively known as the articulators) to change the articulation of their singing. This is done with consonants. There are twenty-one written consonants to choose from, and from a vocal diction standpoint, using the International Phonetic Alphabet, there are approximately twenty-six, because many written consonants make more than one sound. You can also shift consonants between iterations of the exercise to keep your singers on their toes, and to have them notice the interactions between different consonants and vowels. Mixing and matching these with the multiple sounds created by the five vowels gives you a practically limitless array of options. Just doing the conservative math, by multiplying our three note patterns by the five vowels and then multiplying that by the twenty-one consonants we have 315 possible vocal warmups. And that doesn’t take the variations of the patterns or the multiple pronunciations of some consonants into account. Add that to the varied ways of combining just those three pitch patterns discussed earlier and you will never run out of new combinations. Keep these ideas in your back pocket and let go of the fear of not having a variety of warmups. I was in a rehearsal once and forgot the warmup I had planned to do next. I found myself saying “umm, uh, umm” and then made the choir do the exercise in Figure 7.
It actually works well for playing with resonance by closing to the m.
I have several warmup books, and I have often done what the teachers, classrooms, and method books mentioned earlier say and made up warmups based on things in the literature that are tricky, but having this basic methodology to fall back on at any time is always a good thing.