Practice singing ALL of your vowels!!
You may find as a singer, you tend to favor a particular vowel in your daily singing warm up routine. Such as Ahh, or eee. There is probably one or two of the vowels that seems to work best freeing your voice up the fastest so you use it all the time to get your voice into that good spot. I definitly know that I do that. Even me ”the big voice teacher” favors an ee vowel, there, I said it!
When I was younger I used to favor the “Ahh”, but over the years have turned to the trusty “ee”. Well, even I should be careful with this. I have been singing through my book of vocalizes, “Vocalize!” these past few weeks to prepare my voice for an upcoming concert, and I have been forcing myself to “face all the vowels”.
My third volume of Voice Lessons To Go entitled Pure vowels is a great resource for developing all your vowels seperately. I have been singing through all the exercises in volume 3 from start to finish and I have noticed such an improvement on every vowel. The first day, my favorite vowel, “ee”, was great, but I wasn’t pleased with the placement of my “ey” or “i”. But i kept doing it everyday. Working with the sound, mouth positioning, placement in my resonance playing with the forms of the vowels, adding a little “aww” in my “ahh”, and everyday I noticed I was getting better faster.
The only way to improve your weaker vowels is to work on them, not run from them. Always start with speaking the vowel to help you find the natural speech point to work from. You want your singing to sound natural like extended speech. Make sure you practice warming up your singing voice on all the different vowels regularly. You never know when you may be standing in an audition and be asked to site read a new piece on an “ahh”. If you haven’t worked your “ahh” out you could be really uncomfortable.
Also, if you are not used to practicing all your vowels. Don’t start just before a performance. Do your regular warm ups before you have to sing so that you don’t throw off your voice by trying something different. The time to work on this is a normal warm up. Remember, on all my CDs for Voice Lessons To GO, you can always try different vowels with the piano accompaniment for variety.
Now, FACE ALL YOUR VOWELS SINGERS!
written by: Ariella Vaccarino- creator of Voice Lessons TO GO (singing lessons on CD), and author of Vocalize!
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Tags: healthy singing, sing with pure vowels, vocal warm-ups
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