Strengthen Your Singing Voice

Want to have a great voice like Christina Aguilera or Kelly Clarkson of American Idol? To be a great singer, you have to take care of your body both while singing and while resting. With practice, hard work, and changes to your lifestyle, you too can have a beautiful singing voice.

Steps

Maintaining a Singer’s Lifestyle

  1. Maintain systemic hydration.[1] You probably learned when you were young that your voice comes from your voice box, also called your larynx. The larynx contains muscles called “vocal folds” that are covered by a mucous membrane. For your vocal folds to vibrate properly and produce a clear voice, you must keep the mucous membrane hydrated. Systemic hydration means maintaining healthy hydration levels throughout the tissues of the body.
    • Long-term hydration is far more important than short-term hydration, so chugging water the day before a performance will not help you
    • Drink, at minimum, 8 glasses of pure water — not tea, not soft drinks — every day.
    • Avoid dehydrating drink that contain alcohol and caffeine.
    • Drink extra water to compensate for alcohol or caffeine if you drink them.
    • Avoid all carbonated drinks, even uncaffeinated ones, if they give you reflux.
  2. Practice topical hydration. Besides keeping your tissues internally hydrated, you can also keep your vocal cords moist and healthy through external means.
    • Sip your 8 glasses of water throughout the day instead large amounts at once. This will ensure consistent external hydration.
    • Chew gum and suck on hard candies to keep our salivary glands engaged.
    • Swallow saliva from time to time to clean out your throat without clearing it, which is bad for your vocal cords.
    • Maintain a humid environment. If you live in a dry climate, you can purchase a personal steam inhaler at a pharmacy or hold a hot wet towel over your mouth and nose for a few minutes.
  3. Rest your voice consistently.[2] You may love singing, but if you want to do it well, you need to take breaks from time to time. Just as athletes rest muscle groups for a day before working them out again, you need to rest the muscles that produce your voice to avoid injuring them through overwork.
    • If you practice or perform three days in a row, take one day off.
    • If you practice or perform five days in a row, take two days off.
    • Avoid speaking unnecessarily on a day-to-day basis if you have a rigorous singing schedule.
  4. Don’t smoke. Inhaling any kind of smoke, whether first or second-hand, dries out the vocal folds.[3] Smoking can also decrease saliva production, which is important for topical hydration, and increase acid reflux, which can irritate throat tissues.[4] The most important effects, though, are decreased lung capacity and function and increased coughing.
  5. Maintain a healthy lifestyle. Your instrument is your body, so you have to take care of it. Obesity is correlated with poor breath control, which is one of the most important skills a singer must master, so keep your weight down through a healthy diet and lifestyle.[5]
    • Avoid dairy products that create excess mucous that causes you to clear your throat.
    • Avoid excessive caffeine or alcohol, both of which dehydrate the body
    • Eat enough protein to handle the workout your vocal muscles are wearing out through regular use.[6]
    • Exercise regularly, both to keep your weight down and to improve your lung capacity and breath control.

Controlling Your Breath

  1. Understand how breathing works.[7] The most important muscle to be aware of is your diaphragm, a dome-shaped muscle that stretches across the bottom of the rib cage. Contracting the diaphragm (inhaling) pushes down on the stomach and intestines to make room for air, and lowers air pressure in your chest, allowing you to take air into your lungs. [8]To exhale, you can simply relax your diaphragm, which allows the air to leave your chest cavity at a natural rate, or you keep your diaphragm engaged against the stomach and intestines to control the rate of exhalation. The latter is very important for singing.
  2. Be aware of your breathing.[9] To improve your breath control, you need to be completely in tune with the entrance and exit of air from your body. Find a quiet, distraction-free environment where you can sit for a few minutes every day and just focus on how inhaling and exhaling feels in your body.
  3. Practice pulling your breath down into your body. Many people take very shallow breaths that will not help you breathe, so you need to learn how to breathe in a way that makes best use of your lung capabilities.
    • Inhale slowly and deeply, feeling the air move downward through your mouth and throat and into your body. Imagine that the air is very heavy.
    • Visualize pushing it all the way down below your belly button before letting yourself exhale.
    • As you go through repetitions, inhale more quickly. Continue to imagine the air being heavy and pushing it down into your stomach. Feel how your abdomen and lower back expand.
    • Place one hand on your chest, and the other on your stomach. When you inhale, make sure the hand on your stomach moves more than the one on your chest — you should be pulling air down deep into your body, not shallowly into your chest.
  4. Practice holding your breath in your body. After inhaling deeply and pulling the air down into your body, try controlling how long you can keep the air in your body without growing uncomfortable. Try to increase the length of time.
    • Inhale slowly and deeply through your nose, making sure to draw your breath down into your abdomen like in the previous exercise. Try to hold it for a count of seven, then exhale.
    • Repeat several times.
    • Over time, try to increase the length of time you can hold your breath comfortably.
  5. Do exhalation exercises. Exhalation exercises are important for holding steady notes; without them, your voice might waver when you sing.
    • Inhale deeply through your mouth, pushing the air deep into your abdomen.
    • Instead of letting the air rush out at its own natural rate, keep your diaphragm engaged so you can control the rate of exhalation.
    • Take eight seconds to expel all the air from your chest.
    • Once you’ve exhaled, contract your abdominal muscles to push any remaining air from your lungs.
    • One of the most important parts of improving our breathing is making sure we exhale completely.

Exercising Your Voice

  1. Do vocal warmups before singing. You wouldn’t start running before you stretched out, because you could strain and injure the muscles in your leg; the same principle applies to the muscles involved with singing. Before you put your vocal cords through the stress of some serious singing, you want to make sure you warm up your voice so you don’t strain it.
    • Humming is a good way to ease into full-throated singing. Before you begin singing, practice some scales in a hum.
    • Lip trilling warms up the muscles involved with exhalation to prepare them for the controlled breathing required by singing.[10] Keeping your lips pressed together, push air through them to create the sound we associate with being cold: brrrrrrrrr!.[11] Move through your scales in this manner.
  2. Practice your scales. Although singing songs is your ultimate goal, you should practice every day on plain old scales. This will help you gain control of your voice, stay on target with pitch, and move more easily between both adjacent and disparate notes.
    • Listen to Youtube videos to make sure you’re matching your pitch appropriately to the actual notes you should be hitting.[12]
    • Practice singing scales higher and lower than your most comfortable octave to increase your range.
  3. Practice pitching exercises. Pitching exercises like step intervals help you to move easily between notes without losing pitch. Intervals are the distance between two notes, and there are many different exercises you can do that take you through a wide range of vocal exercises.[13] The seven basic Major intervals are Major 2nd, Major 3rd, Perfect 4th, Perfect 5th, Major 6th, Major 7th, and Perfect 8th, and you can find examples of these interval exercises easily online.[14]
  4. Record yourself singing. Sometimes, it’s difficult to hear how we actual sound while we’re singing. Record yourself singing your scales, your pitching exercises, and your favorite songs to hear how you actually sound. You can’t improve if you can’t tell what you’re doing wrong!



Tips

  • Do not try to sound pretty. That will cause you to sound breathy instead. Study all vocal registers and resonators. Try an exercise where you hum along with a song. Than say the lyrics of that song on the right pitch. This will help you sound more clear.
  • Have fun! If you're doing an audition or a performance, pick a song that you like and know well.
  • NEVER drink cold water before you sing. It will shock your vocal chords and make you sound terrible. Try room temperature water, but warm tea is the best.
  • Don't be afraid of your voice. If you don't think you can hit a note, try it anyway. You never know!
  • When moving on to singing words, enunciate! The clearer you are, the better you'll sound.

Related Articles

  • Bet on American Idol

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://www.lionsvoiceclinic.umn.edu/page4.htm
  2. ↑ http://www.singingforaliving.com/articles/pro-secrets/
  3. ↑ http://www.singwise.com/cgi-bin/main.pl?section=articles&doc=CareForVoice
  4. ↑ http://www.webmd.com/heartburn-gerd/features/heartburn-tobacco-connection
  5. ↑ http://www.ohniww.org/effects-of-weight-gain-loss-voice-singing/
  6. ↑ http://www.voiceteacher.com/mathis.html
  7. ↑ http://www.vocalist.org.uk/breathing_exercises.html
  8. ↑ http://breakingmuscle.com/cycling/how-to-activate-your-diaphragm-to-improve-breathing-and-performance
  9. ↑ http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/breathing-basics-for-singing.html
  10. ↑ http://your-personal-singing-guide.com/lip-trill.html
  11. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK-0PhiTAL8
  12. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCxmDUl8__U
  13. ↑ http://musictheorysite.com/intervals
  14. ↑ http://your-personal-singing-guide.com/pitching-exercises-1.html
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