This blog post is called “How a Voice Warm Up can save you time” because, you might need to admit this if you’re in this category (it’s a safe space, don’t worry) one of the objections I come up against when trying to encourage people to do regular warm-ups before they speak and record is, “but I don’t have the time”. Well, poppycock I say! (that’s a peculiar English term that means nonsense or BS) because basically if you’ve learned anything from me so far, you’ll know that a warmup doesn’t need to be long.
5 to 15 minutes is all you need to start with, but also a warmup can literally save your time so that’s what I’m going to explain here… How a warmup can save you time.
Here we go! Time saving tip number one – you’ll save yourself some editing time.
If you warm up your voice before you record, you will reduce your editing time. Because you’ll mess up your words less. That’s right, you’ll have less tongue tied moments, you’ll trip over your words less, you’ll make less mistakes. I’m sorry but anything that reduces editing time gets big thumbs up from me – so doing a voice warm up equals less editing. How good is that?
Next time saving tip… the time you’ll be saving when you’ll have to do less retakes because you aren’t happy with your delivery.
So often if you’ve listened back to your recording and gone “Oh God that didn’t sound like I thought it would” if you’d warmed up well then you’d have been able to show off your wonderfully expressive voice.
You’d have shown your voice all the expressive range it has to play with. You’re showing it the pitches you can reach, the highs, the lows. You’re showing it the tonal changes you can use, the brightness, the warmth, the twang, the depth – all that kind of stuff. You’re showing it the colour, the range, the emotions you have in there. You’re showing your voice where it can go… that’s what a warmup is for. It’s opening up your vocal potential, and if you do that before you start recording, then your voice will be able to go wherever the feck you need to go in order to be expressive.
Finally and maybe most importantly, a vocal warmup can encompass all the other morning routines you have.
This is really exciting. A voice warmup is completely holistic so it has to include your mind, your body, your breath and the voice itself. No I don’t if you’re into any of this stuff, but whether you do some meditation, whether you do some physical practice like yoga or stretching, whether you use therapeutic breathwork, all that stuff that people tend to do in the morning for their mental health and further general happiness in life can be part of your voice warmup.
So your yoga, for example… you need to release your body to prep your voice, so that’s that bit done! The body is done and heck if you add a few hums on the breathing… Bob’s your warmed up voice. Maybe you’re into meditation in the morning, or some wonky version of meditation if you’re me because I always get distracted, but if you do some meditation use that time to do a little body scan to notice tension in the body and encourage physical release, which is really important for vocal freedom.
If you do struggle with focusing when you’re meditating, having a bit of a purpose behind it is actually really useful, so you can use your meditation time to check in for tensions, check in on the breath, check in on your mind and your sense of presence for the day and that will really benefit your warmup.
And then if you’re doing a bit of breath work such as therapeutic breath training or breath for mental health or anxiety. Great! Your breath needs attention and a warm up too, so you can use that to notice maybe any holding patterns in the breath, and get the breath moving and energised and ready to go.
So your warmup can include, and should actually include, all these holistic practices that are part of your morning routine. That you might be using for mental health, maintenance, or managing anxiety, or your general ability to get through the day considering the high mess of the world it’s a win-win.
Basically you’re doing a three-for-one mind/breath/body scan all in your warm up hence saving you time!
So there you go, a voice warm up will save you time. I mean, never come to me with the “But I don’t have time” excuse again. Thank you very much. Plus it’s really really good, fun which I will always come back to as a benefit because I don’t really wanna do anything unless it’s a crack.
That was a remarkably short blog post today, which I think is very in keeping with the warmup time thing – you’re welcome!
You can listen to the equally concise podcast right here if you fancy!
