Why do we need vocal exercises

Understanding the Importance of Singing Exercises

I want to give you a quick explanation of why we do singing exercises. Why don't we jump straight into singing?

It really comes down to how we, as human beings, learn different skills.

Learning Skills: The Guitar Analogy

Whenever we're learning a skill, whether it be guitar or singing, we can draw parallels. Let's take guitar as an example. Within guitar, there are several sub-skills that we need to learn:

• Finger Placement: Learning how to place our fingers on the frets.
• Plucking Strings: Mastering how to pluck the strings individually.
• Playing Chords: Understanding how to form and play chords.
• Quick Finger Configuration: Holding certain finger configurations while playing those chords.

As you can see, there are many subcategories of that skill.

The Subsets of Singing

The same applies to singing. We have:

• Breathing Techniques
• Consonants
• Vowels
• Pitch Coordination: Coordinating pitch with those different consonants and vowels.
• Emotional Expression: Injecting emotion into our singing.

All these components contribute to the subsets of skills within singing.

Focusing on Individual Parts

What we have to do is not look at singing as a big picture and try to work on that. Instead, we need to work on singing in its individual parts as well. This is really what these exercises are geared for, they are designed to build habitual muscle memory for each one of those sub-skills to improve them individually.

Unlearning Bad Habits

Another important aspect to remember is that, when we're learning to sing, unlike learning the guitar, we're not learning a new skill. You've been using your voice your whole life!

Unless you're someone who is mute and doesn't speak, you've been using your voice since the moment you came out of the womb, you were screaming! So, you know how to use your instrument.

However, certain social norms and the way we socialize can hold us back from using our voice properly. We tend to develop bad habits.

When we're learning to sing, most of it is not actually about acquiring a new skill. Rather, we're learning how to undo these bad habits that we've developed over our lives.

Conclusion

That's what a lot of these exercises help us do. I hope this explanation clarifies why we're doing these exercises and gives you a clear picture of how to improve your voice.

Take it to the next level!