[Menvi-discuss] a question regarding vocal concepts

[Chela Robles]

Are Your Lips Up To It?
The Lip Trill, or what some vocal instructors call the "Bubble", is an 
extremely useful warmup exercise for all singers, be it to warmup before 
a performance, or to build a strong and healthy voice!
Imagine you are swimming, and your head is submerged under the surface 
of the water. Now, when you blow air out from your lips, there will be a 
'brbrbrbr' sound, and your lips will vibrate naturally and easily.
Now try to repeat this motion out of the water, by letting your breath 
be released from your mouth, with your lips vibrating in a relaxed 
manner while you control the supply of air with your diaphragm muscles. 
(This is why vocal instructors also refer to the lip trill as 'bubble', 
because it is just like what we do when we are blowing bubbles underwater!)
Build an Exercise Routine
One important point to note is that you should not be blowing air from 
your mouth by pursing your lips. Your lips should be relaxed and the air 
should be controlled with your diaphragm, with your lips vibrating 
freely as the air passes over your lips.
If you are unable to let your lips vibrate freely, place one finger from 
each hand on each side of your face (near where dimples would usually 
be), and gently push into your cheeks, then push your fingers outwards 
to support your lip muscles. This would relieve the lips of any tension 
that might be present, and allow them to vibrate more freely with your 
breath.
Once you are able to produce the 'brbrbrbr' sound with just your lips 
and your breath, we can move on to producing just one note with your 
voice while doing the 'bubble' exercise. Just pick a comfortable pitch 
or note, and try to do the 'bubble' and produce sound for that note at 
the same time.
You can also practise the 'humming' warmup exercise to first understand 
how to produce a good sound , and then reproduce that sound but this 
time do it while you are doing your lip trill exercise! Your lips should 
similarly be relaxed, just as they were when you were practising the 
'brbrbrbr' sound without any pitch or note!
You can also practise this 'bubble' exercise with a variety of notes and 
pitches, as well as with some basic scales and intervals too.
What are the advantages of this exercise and how does it benefit us in 
our singing? Well, firstly, it helps to warmup and relax our lips, so 
that we are better able to practise our diction when singing, as well as 
to wrap certain words or sounds with the vowels that we sing.
Secondly, this exercise takes some pressure off our voice (our vocal 
cords), since some of the air pressure is placed on our lips for them to 
vibrate. This makes it easier and safer for us to do our warmups with 
our voice, since there is less pressure and tension on our vocal cords. 
Lastly, the 'lip trill' exercise also helps us to warmup our diaphragm 
and its surrounding muscles for better breath control and support , 
since we need to be able to provide a steady supply of air for our lips 
to vibrate during the exercise. if you feel that you need more practice 
in this area in order to be able to do the lip trill exercise!
Once we are sufficiently warmed up and know how to develop a strong set 
of vocals, we can move on to singing songs for an appreciative audience!
Breath Support and Singing -
How Are They Related?
We all instinctively know that breath support is important for our 
singing. The question on everyone's lips is: "How Are They Related?" 
Also, how do our breathing exercises aid us in our singing?
Basically, breath and singing are like food and our stomach. One can't 
do without the other - our stomach cannot live without food, and food 
can't be digested without our stomach. In fact, we can't sing without 
breath!
We need breath in order to vocalize even the slightest sustained word or 
note, and breath support is vital in helping us to produce a 
well-supported and stable sound.
So, how do all our basic breathing exercises, advanced breathing 
exercises as well as breathing control tips help us to be able to sing 
better?
(Because as we all know, our ultimate goal for practising these 
breathing exercises is to be able to sing better!)
Let us look at our basic breathing exercises, and draw a relation 
between the various exercises and the way we sing. For basic breathing 
exercise 1 , we practised how to produce a sustained 'ssss' sound with 
our breath, controlling the volume and stability of the sound produced.
This is extremely important for our singing when we need to sustain a 
long note, for example when we sing an 'AH' for 10 counts, and we need 
to keep the sound stable and not shaky.
This breathing exercise also helps us to be able to vary our singing 
volume, by varying the amount of pressure we apply when we produce the 
'ssss' sound. A slight increase in pressure in our abdominal area 
creates a louder 'ssss' sound, and when applied to singing, will create 
a correspondingly louder word or sustained note.
For basic breathing exercise 2 , we practised how to produce a LOUD 
'SSSS' sound with our breath, teaching our diaphragm and abdominal 
muscles to withstand greater tension and pressure.
This is vital for our singing when we need to produce a loud sound, or 
when we need to sustain a high note, since our muscles need to be able 
to generate and maintain a greater amount of pressure in order to be 
able to produce and sometimes project that note or sound outwards to our 
audience!
One way for us to feel the tension required when we sing high notes is 
for us to try to lift up a PIANO with both our arms! Try it and feel the 
core muscles in your abdominal area contracting and becoming tense! That 
is the kind of tension that we would need to be able to support when we 
sing and project our high notes or when we wish to be able to produce a 
louder sound when singing.
As for basic breathing exercise 3 , when we practised how to produce 
bouncy and light 'ssss' sounds with our breath, that would be extremely 
useful to us whenever we need to sing fast songs, or when there are many 
words in a phrase, or when we need to sing staccato in a song. exercise 
3 teaches our diaphragm and its surrounding muscles to be more flexible 
in their breath control and usage, and this is vital whenever we sing 
fast songs, or even light and happy songs, which sometimes require us to 
be lighter and bouncier when we sing!
This is in stark contrast to the slow love ballads that we may sing, 
which will require us to use more of the techniques taught in basic 
breathing exercises 1 and 2, where we sustain long notes, and also vary 
dynamics gradually from soft to loud and vice versa.
Ok! So, now that we understand how our breath support aids us in our 
singing, and how the various breathing exercises help us to vocalize 
better, we can move on to producing sounds with our voice!
Our Vocal Cords -
The Origin Of Our Voice!
When we talk about singing, most of us rarely talk about our vocal 
cords, and would begin by emphasizing our breathing, since the first 
action that we do is actually to breathe before we even begin to make 
any sound! We believe that once we train ourselves to be able to control 
our breathing well, we will be able to sing well too.
However, equally important is our set of vocal cords, which is the 
origin of our strong and healthy voice! Without them, we would have NO 
voice, even if we have a strong diaphragm and lots of breath in our lungs.
Our vocal cords are actually housed in what we call our 'voice box' or 
larynx, also commonly known as our 'Adam's Apple', which is most easily 
seen as a bulge in most men's throats.
These cords produce sound through rapid vibration with the passage of 
air between the set of cords. When the air passes through the cords, 
forcing them apart, the cords immediately close back, creating multiple 
vibrations at a certain frequency, and this creates what our human ear 
perceives as the sound of our voice. This also means that our vocal 
cords bear the brunt of the air pressure created when we sing!
Another fact that most people do not know is that these cord muscles 
actually can control our breathing too! Previously, our focus was on how 
our diaphragm and its surrounding muscles control our breathing, but it 
is also a fact that our cords can control our breath, by shutting 
completely and not letting any air out of our body!
We can demonstrate this by pronouncing these words loudly: "HAK!!! 
Ah....." Make sure that you shut your cord muscles completely at the end 
of the word "HAK!!!", and only when you let some air pass through your 
cords, it will allow you to produce the next word, "Ah...." as a form of 
release...
You can also demonstrate how our cords control our breathing by holding 
your breath and leaving your mouth open! It is this important set of 
muscles that is holding back the breath in our body, and once our cords 
are open, the breath will be able to pass through!
One other important and useful fact about our voice is that for LOW 
notes, our cord muscles are relatively less tense and less stretched 
out. However, for HIGH notes, our cords are much more tense and more 
stretched out! This means that when we do our humming or lip trill vocal 
warmups and we do progressively higher notes, our cord muscles are 
actually being stretched out more and becoming more and more tense!
This would mean that we need to be more careful when we start to sing 
higher and higher notes, as our cord muscles are subject to more and 
more strain, and they would then be more vulnerable to vocal abuse.
Various vocal warmup exercises are available in this website to stretch 
out our vocal cords before singing to prevent unnecessary harm to our 
voice. There are also other vocal training exercises to help us to 
develop a strong and healthy singing voice!
One very important point to note is that we should not be over-zealous 
when we are training our vocal cord muscles. Just as we would not want 
to strain our back or sprain our shoulders when we lift weights, we 
would also not want to hurt our voice muscles by over-training or 
subjecting them to much fatigue.
A general guideline is that whenever we feel fatigue or even slight pain 
in our voice or throat, STOP and REST! This will prevent any unnecessary 
damage to these small but important muscles in our voice box!
Lip trills are like making horse noises with your mouth except for 
vocals you add vocal notes to it where as trumpeters really truly make 
horse noises then then buzz like a kazoo.
Here is more from this web site: http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/

--
"Passion is a great motivator. Music is a life-long learning experience."
--
Chela Robles a Nationally Certified person in Customer Service, certified by the National Retail Federation Foundation (NRF): http://www.nrffoundation.com/
E-mail: cdrobles693 at gmail.com
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Skype: jazzytrumpet
A Lady And Her Trumpet Learning Ally Blog Entry: http://tinyurl.com/d3okj95 please request me to send the two sound clips via email since the site has changed somewhat
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--

On 1/27/2013 9:23 PM, Kelsey Nicolay wrote:
> Chela,
> YOU mentioned you play trumpet.  Perhaps you could help me out. My 
> voice teacher is trying to teach me how to do the lip trill for a 
> vocal exercise.  I can't seem to do it.  How would you describe it?
> Thanks,
>
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