In this Vocal Exercise Agility and Pronunciation Mine & Yours, we’re gonna improve our vocal folds agility together with our elocution on a Major Scale going down.
Ready? Let’s sing!
Vocal Exercise | Agility and Pronunciation | Mine &Â Yours
This is an exercise you can use to warm-up after some “mmm” or “brr”. If your voice is cold like you haven’t been speaking a lot before, try to sing in head voice as soon as your throat tightens up to be gentle with those tiny vocal folds.
This exercise helps you:
- to train your ear,
- to strengthen your vocal muscles,
- to learn how to sing legato,
- to improve your elocution.
TRAIN YOUR EAR
Some say vocalizes are boring, vocalizes are not required to learn how to sing. OK, you may be able to learn to sing only by singing songs but if you’re really serious about your singing, you’d want to train your musical ear. Way to go is by singing scales multiple times so your brain and your vocal muscles remember the gesture your doing to sing on pitch.
Remember that songs are made of pitches/notes forming intervals.
They can be in Major or in Minor.
With this exercise, you’re training your ear singing a Major scale going down.
STRENGTHEN YOUR VOCAL MUSCLES
Singing scales going up or down half a step at a time allows your vocal folds to slowly “do the gym”.
By repeating the gesture, they will gain in strength and you’re going to feel more at ease and sing with more freedom.
Try to repeat the exercise:
- 1st time: with eyes closed, only focusing on the sound, the intervals, your vowels
- 2nd time: looking far away in the distance, projecting your voice (without shouting though 🙂 )
- 3rd time: record yourself, listen to the recording to get used to listening to your own voice and to be able to spot what’s wrong and what’s great as well!
LEARN TO SING LEGATO
Legato means linked. In this Vocal Exercise “Agility and Pronunciation, Mine & Yours”, try to link your vowels “I” in “mIIIIIne” and “OH” in “yOUOUOUOUOUrs”.
You’re using the same airflow, the same breath for the whole musical pattern, breathing at the beginning of each pattern.
It has to do with our vocal folds elasticity and our ability to ear and match the pitches well.
IMPROVE YOUR ELOCUTION
In the exercise, we sing “Mine” and “Yours”, not “My” and “Your”. Thus, we have to pronounce the N in “miNe” and the “S” in “yourS”.
It is very important to train yourself to have a better elocution, even if you’re not going to sing Musicals. We want our audience to understand our lyrics and to listen to us, don’t we?
When we speak, we can be lazy and not pronounce very well the words but, usually, the person we are talking to is right in front of us and, even if we’re on the phone, our voice is not “covered” by instruments.
Keep checking your elocution along the exercise as it’s very easy to forget it as we also focus on the other things like pitch, timing, legato, registers… 😉
VOCAL EXERCISE | AGILITY and PRONUNCIATION | Mine & Yours
I hope you’ll enjoy the exercise. Add it to your agenda so you remember to train your voice. And please let me know how it went in the comments, how did you feel singing it?
Also, if you don’t want to miss any of my Vocal Tips, Exercises and Warm-Ups, subscribe to my newsletter below. I send it once a month and it summarizes the new articles and videos.
Have fun singing!
–Vahn
Further Readings:
- Vocal Exercise for Pitch Accuracy & Vocal Flexibility (video)
- How to Start Singing | The 4 Major Steps to Singing (video)
- Vocal Warm-Up After a Singing Break (video)
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