Before you do anything too strenuous it’s a good idea to do some singing warm ups to help to get your throat into the “sweet spot” so that you can perform with out any signifigant fear of cracking on your highs or sing the stuff slightly flat or pitchy.

Just like singing in general, I think you need to attack your  warm up regiment in such a way that you start off doing the stuff that’s easy. You need to get your throat and vocal cords warmed up without hurting them. If you try to do anything too high then you may run the risk of hurting yourself.

When I can, I like to start off simply singing scales. I sing them in a variety of phonetic phrases and different vowel shapes, so that I can cover most of the different mouth shapes I may come across when I’m actually singing a song. I start in a comfortable range and work my way gradually higher going up and down, up and down, until I’ve reached my high limit. Singing scales is a good way for me to concentrate on my “break” point between my chest and head voice, and allows me the opportunity to work on connecting the two voices.  This is called mix. The break can be something that is not always so easy to anticipate when the break will occur in a song depending what you’re singing. I find that while the break may occur on one note in one song, it may occur on another note in another song, depending on my mouth shape, etc. Paying attention to this during your singing warm ups will eventually help you to overcome that break in your voice and learn to connect your chest and head voices.

The nature if the singing work that I do leaves me very little time to warm up properly much of the time so to help combat that, we generally structure the opening of our night with songs that I can sing easily, and increase the difficulty of the singing as the night goes on. With that said however, there can still be an audible difference between the times I sing that opening song after having warm up, and after not warming up. It definitely sounds smoother after a warm up.

Brett Manning of Singing Success is one of the premier vocal instructors in the industry today and is known to be a vocal coach to such stars as Keith Urban, Miley Cyrus, and Haley Williams. He offers not only a vocal instructional program but a singing warm up set as well. You can click on the image below to check them out in a new window.

Brett also offers Singing Success Online which offers singing lessons in a video format that you can download. It’s a membership type site in which the membership last for a year, but for that year you have access to all of the lessons on the  site which can be downloaded so you can view them again and again, as many times as you need. The lessons are rated from beginner level to advanced level and are entitled appropriately to help you select which lesson is the right lesson for you, right now. They’re videos of actual lessons that Brett and his staff have given, with the student there. It’s as if you get to sit in the lesson at hand. I highly recommend this program. Click on the image to check it out.