Unit 64 - Singing techniques in performance

Monday 29^th January

This morning I carried out a full, comprehensive singing warmup in preparation for todays lesson. Here is a video of me carrying out the warmup:

As you can see from the video, I worked through many different exercises which warm up lots of different parts of the body which are all involved when singing. 
I started the warmup with intercostal diaphragmatic breathing exercise. This breathing exercises enables me to open up my lungs and swing the ribs and ensure that air is going right to the bottom of my lungs. I know that when we breathe naturally we only utilize the top part of our lungs, this is called clavicular breathing. It is essential that I carry this exercise out on a regular basis because I won't be able to sing the songs with conviction or control if I am not employing proper breathing techniques.  When this exercise is carried out on a regular basis, it will improve many things such as increasing my lung capacity so that I can hold notes for longer and allowing better control during the performances of songs. The second exercise that I carried out was a long note on 'ha'. There are 2 benefits to this exercise, the 'h' sound opens the throat and the length of the exercises helps to improve lung capacity if it is carried out on a regular basis. I will be practicing this at least 3 times a week and actually, my lecturer has commented on the fact that I am able to hold the note for increasingly longer periods of time. Carrying out the breathing exercise before this exercise enables me to have more control when going into this exercise and which enables me to hold the note on for longer. Thirdly, I carried out some humming. By carrying out this exercise, it allows the lips to warm up. This is very important in singing because it will help with my articulation and performance of the songs. I can identify when I am carrying this exercise out to the best of my ability when my lips vibrate. The next exercise that I carried out was 'm n'. This involves saying the consonants and gradually getting faster. This helps with my articulation during the rehearsals and performances. I then carried out some exercises where I was accompanied on the piano by Cara. The first exercise that I carried out with the piano was some scales. Scales are a great way to warm up and benefit different areas of the voice. One, depending on which note you start, regular practice of scales can improve your vocal range. Two, they can help with note recognition and therefore overall tuning. These can be really helpful for people who struggle with singing in tune. As I don't struggle with this, I feel that singing scales really helped warm my voice up. Arpeggios 'I am on top of the world'. This is a great exercise for intonation, this is tuning within passages of music. I find this exercise really useful as it's quite fast and you need to use your listening skills keenly to ensure you sing it with accuracy. Again, this forms part of my regular practice routine and I will carry it at least 3 times a week. Lastly, I ran through a technical exercise. This consolidates and brings together all of the exercises that I have carried out in this warmup. It especially helps with articulation and control over my singing. The second half of this exercise is really difficult as you have to sing a long sequence on one breath. If I haven't taken in sufficient breath halfway through I know I can't get to the end. I am working on the ending on 'Mr Blue Sky' and I really want to hold a strong note to finish it off, so the technical exercise will impact on my ability to do this. 
Along the way, my teacher asked me several different questions about why I was carrying out these exercises. I was then ready to start working on my songs for the singing performance.

We started working on ‘Mr Blue Sky’ first. Whilst I was singing through the song and Cara was playing the piano, Cara tried singing some harmonies on some of the lines to give specific lines a bit of a boost. Once we had run through it a few times, we picked out the lines which I thought the harmonies were going to really work. We decided to leave the first verse as it is because I think this is a nice gentle way to start the song. There are then harmonies in the chorus which we have already been working on with Molly and Kellyann. We will now need to teach them the new harmonies that we have put in.

We then moved on to working on ‘In the Summertime’. At the moment, I am still learning the lyrics for this song so we aren’t really working on anything technical at the moment. We will start to work on it more once I know the lyrics.

The last song that we were working on today was ‘The Sweet Escape’. In this song there is a really fast part which I need to be able to sing. I have been practicing it every lesson and I am nearly secure on it. I needed to make sure that I was secure on the lyrics first before I sped it up. I worked on this part of the song for quite a bit of time.