Chew and hum with neck movement

Day 10 Music Lesson: Jaw Looseness Exercise

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I'll be your...

Welcome!

So, welcome back to Day 10! How has practice been going? It's a good time to check in, making sure that you're keeping up with the exercises three to four times a day, separating them out with at least an hour break in between.

Importance of Breaks

Again, this is a crucial aspect of your success throughout this course. Building in rest and relaxation is one of the key elements that's going to make this course effective.

New Exercise: Jaw Looseness

The next exercise I want to give you guys to work on is a great exercise to create looseness in the jaw. Up until now, we've been trying to build some independence of the tongue and jaw muscles with the La Ga exercise and the tongue out exercise.

Focus on the Jaw

Now we're going to focus a little bit more on the jaw itself. This is a deceptively simple exercise, but extremely effective. The key to this exercise is to focus on the relaxing nature of it.

Here's how we'll do it:

1. Start with a hum:

   • Begin in your lower range.
   • Slide up into a higher range.

2. Incorporate chewing:

   • As you hum, pretend to chew.

This helps to get the jaw operating independently of the motion of the vocal cords.

Detailed Steps

Let's do that again and focus on the relaxing effect it has. It might be nice to integrate a little bit of rotation of the head to start feeling that looseness of the head on top of the neck.

Slowly bring it higher into your range. The key is to focus on not pushing or straining to make it happen, but allowing for the sound to come out.

Five Tone Scale

Now, what we're going to do for this exercise is simply put it on the five tone scale. So we'll go like this:

• (insert specific notes or pattern here)

As you do it, you might notice a certain wawa effect that happens as you move your jaw. That's perfectly fine!

Final Thoughts

We're not focusing on being dead on pitch and making sure that it sounds great. The end result will definitely sound great, but this will not necessarily sound beautiful.

As with the previous exercises that we've gone through, I won't mention it again after this point. To do the full exercise, you have to refer back to the audio section of this course.