Joett's Music Blog: Vocal Training Tip of the Day: Why Beginners Must Avoid Doing Vocal Exercises with Vowels

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Vocal Training Tip of the Day: Why Beginners Must Avoid Doing Vocal Exercises with Vowels

If you have experienced difficulty with vocal training using the vowels, then chances are you are a complete beginner and you will need a bit of guidance on WHY it isn’t working for you and what needs to be done to correct that. This article was inspired by pupils who work with me via WhatsApp. I have cautioned a million times, but it looks like some of them choose not to heed my advice and instead go right ahead and work with the vowels on beginners level regardless. Judging from submitted tapes, however, it isn’t quite working for them. Let me tell you why.

Words are made up of vowels and consonants, and lyrics are a group of words set in phrases. Now here is the catch. If you’ve had little or no voice training and you’ve been singing with incorrect vocal posture for as long as you can remember, when you begin a vocal training program comprising these familiar vowels, chances are your bad habits of delivering notes incorrectly and straining while you’re at it will definitely come back to haunt you. So if you feel you’re a complete flop when you start out with vocal training using the vowels without the supervision of a vocal coach, it doesn’t surprise me. The more you see the logic in this, the more you’ll want to get it right from the get-go. And here’s how.

The fastest way to rebalance your voice is to do the scales with speech level posture. However, you’ll need to step away from familiar territory—the vowels, and to work with the scales using the lip roll, the tongue trills and possibly, in some cases, the hum works nicely for some people. In essence, this is where your vocal training journey should begin. You see, the minute you introduce the vowels to your scales before you’ve had much training, you’ll find that your old habits (shouting and straining) will automatically kick in. The only way to circumvent that is to apply any of the above lip rolls, tongue trills and humming to the scales that you do, until such time when your voice is rebalanced to allow you to sing the vowels AND songs with good speech level posture. You’re going to be surprised to find just how effective this vocal workout plan is for you. If you’re the kind of person that wants to get it right in training, then this will be exactly what you need to do. The video below shows you how to do the lip roll.