Tip #7: Breath in and out

Using your voice without having your vocal chords trained and warmed up can hurt you and send you to vocal rest for a couple of days. It can even get you nodules which is everything but ideal! In this article we’ll go over one of the most important parts of good vocal technique, breathing.

Part of removing part of the strain your vocal chords go through is to breath properly. As voice artists, we need to have full control of our breathing and diaphragm to be able to reach our full potential and reduce the possibilities of injuries. The largest part of our lungs is located around our rib cage so you want to make sure that you are really getting the air all the way down there.

Using your lungs’ full potential requires practice, practice and… yeah! even more practice and to help out we bring you 2 exercises you can try out to get better at it.

• Inhale, hold and exhale in tempo. This one is quite challenging as we’re used to breath, but not with any specific time constraints. Inhale, hold, and exhale in different intervals to get to control your rhythm. This will help you when having to read long, unpaused lines or when you have to read a spot in a very specific amount of time (for, say, radio or TV spots, for example). Start with equivalent intervals (2-2-2, 4-4-4, 6-6-6, etc.) going up until you can’t control it and then mix them up (2-4-2, 4-2-6, 8-4-6, etc.). We recommend using a metronome so the intervals all last the same. If you try to do this manually, you may go faster when exhaling as you’re already tired from holding your breath up. We suggest you set the tempo between 60 and 80 bpm (beats per minute) as these will feel the most natural to your body. 

• Inhale and exhale with the sound of an ‘s’. This exercise will help you control the intensity of your exhaling. The ‘s’ should sound consistent throughout the exhaling so you have to put a lot of attention to listening how your ‘s’ comes across when doing this. Before you start, exhale every bit of air you have in your lungs until you feel you’ve really emptied them out and breath in again until you feel that your lungs are completely full of air. You can mix this exercise with the previous one by adding the ‘s’ to the intervals. You can get as creative as you want!

If you try these out, let us know in the comments how it went for you! We’d love to know your experience. Also, if you have more exercises hit us up!