6 Beginner Exercises to Improve Your Singing

Here’s a list of some easy exercises to do at home, with almost no equipment.

1. The Straw Exercise

Get yourself a glass of water and a straw. You’re going to make regular bubbles in the water. You need to have low breathing and relax your stomach. This exercise helps to rebalance air pressures. It allows you to properly dose the exhaled and inhaled air, and thus allows better contact of the vocal cords. When you produce a sound, your vocal cords touch each other, so they’re in contact and the air passing through separates them. The air shouldn’t be sent too hard so as not to damage the voice. This exercise, by learning to better measure projected air, prevents vocal fatigue.

Demonstration and explanations:

2. Humming / Resonance Exercise

To warm up, you don’t necessarily need to produce notes; there are methods to prepare your voice with your mouth closed, that is: “occluded vocal tract.” They help to start voice work gently. The sound shouldn’t come from the throat, but through the nose. Humming allows you to feel the placement of your voice thanks to nasal consonants. You should hum a melody with your mouth closed. You should feel the resonance of your breath, without going too high in the treble or descending into the bass; the sound should remain flexible. In addition to being a relaxing exercise, you can have fun working on this resonance on scales or your favorite melodies!

Humming demonstration:

3. Lip Trill

To perform the lip trill, close your lips and make them vibrate with your breath, while adding an onomatopoeia: Bra, Bri, Bro, etc… The mouth should vibrate with the B sound, like that sound we make when we want to mime being cold while holding our arms: Brrr… It’s a basic warm-up exercise that also helps relax the mouth, tongue, and jaw, work on flexibility, help manage breath, and eliminate all tensions in the throat.

Explanation and demonstration of lip trill:

Céline Dion’s trill training:

4. The Siren

For this exercise, you just need to imitate with your mouth a police or fire siren, with your mouth closed. This gives a long “Hmm” that you’ll have to work on differently. You can start in the treble, at the top of the scale and go down, or conversely start in the bass, at the bottom of the scale and go up. If performed correctly, you’ll feel a slight tingling on your lips and nose, like a tickle. It’s difficult to hurt your voice with the siren exercise and that’s what makes it perfect training for beginners and the start of a singing session!

Piano demonstration of the siren:

5. Scales

For this, you can either use a piano or watch videos available online. Piano notes appear and you just have to sing the notes (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si). This warm-up exercise is one of the best known. It allows you to place notes and make them go up and down in scales to later be able to master the pitch of your voice. These exercises will later allow you to model a melody by mastering scale ascents and descents.

Work your scales on piano:

6. Glissando

This exercise is a slide from one note to another through other intermediate notes. Its name means “slide” in Italian. More concretely, it’s the way to make a transition between several notes. This transition should be slow enough to be fluid, and not hear all the notes between the two extremes. It’s a modeling of sound pitch, whether going up or down, like for example a fire truck siren.

Explanation and demonstration of glissando: