An insight to my Daily Workout!

Hello!

I'll be looking to update this blog a lot more often now with my latest progress...

As I've mentioned before, I follow Jaime Vendera's books which include breathing exercises as well as vocal exercises.

Today, I'm focusing on 'The Ultimate Vocal Workout Diary' which helps to keep track of your progress.

Very basic tables are involved listing down the rows the different exercises - how to do them can be found in Jamie Vendera's Raise Your Voice book. Along the columns are the days 'Monday - Sunday'.

For example, this is what today's table looks like for me:

                                Mon   Tues   Wed   Thurs   Fri   Sat   Sun

VSR                         X

Falsetto                  
Upscale-                  G5
Downscale-             G3

Transcending
     Tone
Upscale-                 G4
Downscale-             C4

Full Voice
Upscale-                 A4
Downscale-             A1

Vibrato
Pitch, Larynx
Stomach, Jaw

Non-Vocal
(Bullfrogs,              Bullfrog x 60
Tongue Pushups)

Advanced
(Scream, Grit,       Scream - C6
Growl Whistle)

Daily Dose


Now this all seems very technical stuff... and it is, but it helps an awful lot if you want to learn to sing properly.

Today, I'll briefly go over the different sections of the table and tomorrow I'll go into more detail about it.


VSR is something I will cover tomorrow!

...For all of these exercises I use a 'yay' sound. For the falsetto, I use C4 (middle C on the piano) as a starting point. I then slide up from a C4 to a C5 using a 'yay' sound and keep repeating this till my highest falsetto note without straining. So after the C, I go from a D4 to a D5 and so on. It's the same for the down scale except I slide down rather than up!

It's the same for full voice too. But as the 'full voice' is deeper than the falsetto, I use a C3 as my starting reference.

With the transcending down (I struggle with this one) it's a case of staying on that same note whilst going from full voice into falsetto.

Vibrato I have left blank as I need an extra piece of equipment for this which I will go into more tomorrow.

For the non-vocal exercises I do the bullfrog! Basically, you move your Adams Apple back and forth so you look like a bullfrog... again, I'll explain more tomorrow the benefits of this!

Lastly, the advanced exercises as explained in the brackets are things like screams, growls etc. I've only tried the scream as that's more my sort of thing. I love the glam rock era, the 80's hair metal etc so that's the sort of sound I'm looking for when it comes to screaming. As you can see, this is one of my stronger techniques... When I 1st started out I could scream to a G5 but not hold onto it. Now I can scream out a C6 (2 octaves above middle C) and add vibrato without wavering out of tune so I'm pretty chuffed with that!

Daily Dose... again, I will come to that tomorrow!

After I've covered these areas in more details, I will go onto the breathing exercises. :)

Hope you found this informative and hope you're all well!

Barry. :)