Description:
The easiest, most effective head voice warm ups for beginners use narrow vowels like OO and EE. The resonance of these vowels are such that your voice has an easier time lightening and thinning into that head voice function. Wide vowels, like those in the words HEY and YEAH, on the other hand, are more helpful for chest voice, and could actually make it harder for you to enter your head voice.
The first warmup pairs a soft TH sound with the vowels OO and EE. Notice that we’re starting with airflow in the TH sound. Let’s try it out!
Exercise 1: Thoo-ee 5-1 (high E to A)
We are returning to our hollow cuckoo clock sound for our next exercise, and is a great exercise to be playful with! It’s more “making sound” than “singing”, but it’s getting us comfortable with this function of the voice.
Exercise 2: Hollow cuckoo 3-1, 3-1
Last exercise is a sliding EE to OO on a 1-5,1-5 pattern. In this case, however, we are going down to 5 from 1. Think of this like push ups for your head voice. It’s very important that we slide and stretch our ee vowel open almost like it’s an ah here! It’s easier for your voice to stretch into those higher pitches when you allow it to slide, rather than jumping accurately to the next pitch. The best way to accomplish this is to think of pulsing your support up the EE vowel and then relax back to the lower ooh vowel like this.
Let’s sing it!
Exercise 3: Sliding EEE- OO (head voice push up) 1 down to 5, (1-5 1-5)
In the next lesson, we’ll practice incorporating head voice with our chest voice.
Audio:
Lessons:
- 1: Welcome
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2:
Warmup
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3:
Finding Head Voice Function
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4:
More Embellishment
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5:
Incorporating Head Voice
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6:
Conclusion
Instructor: Abram Poliakoff
Abram Poliakoff is a singer, guitarist, pianist, teacher, conductor, and composer. He received a Bachelors of Music in Vocal Arts from USC’s Thornton School of Music and has been teaching music for 8 years. He is currently both the Associate Artistic Director and a tenor in the L.A. Choral Lab, which recently released its first studio album Sonic Visions in the fall of 2019. Abram teaches and performs a wide range of genres including Classical, Jazz, Folk and Popular music in the Los Angeles area. He has also sung with the San Francisco Opera and Pocket Opera in the Bay Area. His teaching mission is to help his students utilize vocal technique to find their authentic and healthy voice while maximizing genre flexibility and a naturalness of expression.