Singing (Written piece on vocal exercises)

At the beginning of performing arts I didn't know much about singing and how certain vocal exercises are sure to help you improve and develop your vocal techniques. I wasn't a great singer and I'm still not a confident singer however I have noticed I can sustain notes and my pitch has got much better, it sounds less like I'm straining my vocal chords. Doing vocal exercises is a great way to warm up the voice before using it. Not only do vocal exercises help the voice, but whole body warm ups do as well. We don't realise that whilst we're using our voices, we're also using the whole of body. Our posture needs to be long and straight so we don't cut the air off. The most common muscle we use is our diaphragm. It helps to stretch our abdomen, back, neck and shoulders so we can avoid stress which has an impact on the sound of our voices. For the vocal training we use breath control, diction, blending and balance.

There are a wide variety of vocal exercises: Breathing awareness, humming, long vowels, sirening, 5 note scale, major triad, minor triad, major vs minor, note endings. tone vs semitone, crescendo diminuendo and arpeggios. All these vocal techniques will help your vocal chords. During our singing lesson, we use humming, vowel sounding and diction. These exercises are very helpful personally. I can now sustain a note I'm singing and also my pitch has improved. I find because of where I'm from and the accent I have possessed  the diction exercises help a lot. My accent involves not pronouncing some letters in certain words, so the diction will help me to pronounce those words when singing. I also find my vocals sound a lot better, more alive and loud when I'm standing compared to when I'm seated or hunched. I personally think we should include whole body warm ups as well as the vocal warm ups, this will ensure the whole of our bodies are warmed up, and we will benefit the most when singing.

Singing

15th October 2012

Targets for 22nd October 2012:
- To create a harmony to Destiny Childs Say my name with my group.
- Warm up body and vocal chords before singing.
- Write all work down.

Review for 22nd October 2012:





To get the performance I want for our harmony to Say my name, I feel we need to research more into harmony's so we have a better understanding of what it is we are supposed to convey in our performance. We are working as a group so it will be best to find harmony's that will suit us all. Also we need to do vocal warm ups and body warm ups that we think will not only help us as a group but individually when we rehearse, so when it comes to our performance we know what most suitable warms up are so we can do them before our performance. The song is quite fast so doing diction warm ups will help, because we need to make sure we pronounce every word clearly, so our voices don't fade away.

At the moment I think our group is working at a slow pace and we need to pick it up. It took us 2 lessons to find out which song we are going to use, even though we have 5 weeks to do this, we only have 1 lesson a week to create something and rehearse. I think the sooner we create some harmony's the more time we can spend rehearsing them.