Hi it's Elissa Weinzimmer founder of Voice Body Connection and it is time for
another How to Warm Up video
how to warm up
in today's How to Warm Up video we are going to practice easy onsets.
Now easy onsets are very important when you
have a habit of doing what's called a glottal attack. And a glottal attack is
when your vocal cords come together and then explode apart and it makes a sound
like this: Let me explain further.
So here are your vocal cords in your airway, okay?
When they're together then you're not
breathing, you're not sending any air through the airway, you're holding your
breath. When they're slightly apart and the air comes through they can start to
phonate, or vibrate as it's called, right. And then when they're all the way
open you're just breathing. Okay open airway. Now sometimes people have a habit
of pressing their vocal cords together before they start making sound and then
they send a burst of air through and you get what's called a glottal onset where
the air comes bursting through and you get a little bit of almost it sounds
like a little hiccup in the vocal cords or a little bit of a pop. And when that
happens it's not necessarily an evil thing but the issue is that many times
people are using excess effort to press the vocal cords together in the first
place and that may mean that there's some tension or fatigue building up
inside the throat. So to do an exercise that is an easy onset exercise make sure
during your warm-up that you are not using excess effort in your throat.
Here's an exercise you can do.
So we're going to use a very classic phrase to
practice which is Elliot Ate An Apple. Now you may notice in that phrase that
Elliot Ate An Apple are all words that start with a vowel. You can actually only
ever do a glottal onset when you have a vowel at the beginning of the word.
The reason is if you have a consonant that means that your articulators are
blocking the airflow somewhere else so you can't also block the airflow at your
throat. However, when you have a vowel that begins a word you can block the
airflow at your throat and start with a glottal onset.
So someone who does this phrase with a glottal onset with glottal onsets
would sound like this Elliott Ate An Apple. Can you hear how
there's a little bit of a pop at the beginning of every word? Elliott Ate An
Apple. What we want to do instead is have an easy onset we want to go Elliott Ate
An Apple. What I think this requires is thinking all the way down to the guts of
you. You can go back to the breath support exercise in this How To Warm Up
series and practice making sure that sound is flowing from your core, from
your belly support up and out. Elliott Ate An Apple.
Now if this cue to have breath
support is not quite doing the trick for you yet, here's the next thing you can do
is put a mini little H sound on the beginning of your words that have vowels.
Okay so you can go like H-Elliot H-Ate H-An H-Apple and then you can make it
smaller and smaller. Elliott H-Ate H-An H-Apple. Right? You're just making a really
small little H. When you do that what you're actually doing is training the
vocal cords to stay slightly apart because you can't make that H sound
unless they're slightly apart with air already flowing through them before you
get to the vowel sound. And by the way kudos to Edith Skinner, the matron of
speech work in the US, for creating this exercise nearly a century ago.
So this exercise can be done with Elliott Ate An Apple or really any sentence that
begins with all vowel sounds and once you master eliminating the glottal
onsets in your exercise, of course practice it in what you're singing, what
you're speaking, whatever you are vocalizing on any given day. Now this is
indeed a sound exercise in the progression of the How To Warm Up series
so it pertains to the vocal chords and of course onset of sound you can put it
right smack dab in the middle of your warm-up. Enjoy and I will see you soon
in a How To Warm Up Video
How To Warm Up