What & How To Practise in 5 Minutes A Day

You’ll often hear me say that the magic happens BETWEEN lessons but so many of my students tell me that they’re not sure HOW to practise – so this very short course will help you set up your absolute best home practise in 5 sessions of 5 minutes a day. Each day will add on from the first so you end up at the end of the course with a great 5 minute a day practise incorporating all the tools we will remind ourselves of this week. Let’s get started.

Day 1: 

From our work in lessons you know the importance of postural alignment, and the balance between air pressure and air flow. Today we revisit these core basics. To get our body functioning best for singing we need the best postural alignment – for singers this is feet hip width apart, loose knees, loose pelvis, lifted and opened out chest, long back of the neck, loose jaw.

Let’s take one of our singing tools, SOVT (more next lesson) and test air pressure and air flow. We know the ratio should be never more than 3/10 pressure. Could use kazoo, flowball, straw or other SOVT is rolled r, lip trill. We are going to siren and check the air pressure and flow whilst checking our postural alignment. Negative practise. Needs to be free and easy. Now we have our airflow/pressure sorted and are standing in the most efficient way to sing. Tomorrow we’ll look at SOVT exercises to warm up the voice.

Day 2 : 

More on SOVT – today we are going to look at SOVT exercises in more detail. First let’s stand in our good alignment – feet hip width apart, loose knees, loose pelvis, lifted and opened out ribcage, long back of the neck. SOVT stands for semi-occluded vocal tract exercises and those could be kazoo, flowball, straw, rolled r, lip trill or even humming. The reason for these is that they warm up the voice without tiring it out so you can go through your whole range without tiring your voice. Great for before a concert or just to wake the voice up and get it warmed up before singing your repertoire.

We are going to siren, and it doesn’t need to be the same pitches as me – it just needs to be going from the lowest note you are comfortable singing to the highest note you are comfortable singing. Kazoo first, then rolled r, then lip trill, then humming. Do this for about a minute. Tomorrow we are going to add this into your song.

Day 3 : 

Adding the SOVT to Repertoire. Today we start to look at a piece of repertoire. You should have some music – it doesn’t matter for now if you can read music just follow the words. Let’s stand in our alignment, use a kazoo, do a siren, check that everything feels free and easy – then let’s learn this chorus – Will ye go lassie go… But today we are going to use SOVT to understand how much breath we need. Along the words put a tick. Tomorrow we’ll look more at breathing.

Day 4 : 

The Splat Breath - so far, we have looked at the breath in terms of flow and pressure but not spoken about breathing for singers. This is different – breath is our fuel and we need to use an active outflow to sing well – the breath supports the sound. Blow out as long as you can, hold for a second and then allow air to flow in. The in breath is a non-event – we don’t want big gaspy breath because that creates tension, we don’t want to overfill because that creates tension – let’s do negative practice to show that. Where your tick marks are from yesterday, we’ll think about breathing. Stand, kazoo, siren, Will ye go lassie go, with kazoo – then think about breath stops – take your time here this bit is essential. 

Day 5 :

Bringing it all together. For a connected home practise there are a few elements we need. Firstly, postural alignment, then air flow and pressure, SOVT practice, SOVT in the first verse or so of your repertoire to give you an idea of where you need to fuel your breaths, ticks – splats and there you are warmed up and ready to sing your repertoire. This is of course the beginnings of a home practise – from here I add in my bespoke exercises which are dependent on which area of technique you are practising, for instance you may be working on jaw/tongue independence, or tongue root tension, or intention (primal sound), support with the body (on the ball), register work or any of the other technical areas – but this is the basis and is the same for everyone. Now carry on for a week and let me know what happens.