hey chris liepe here with what nobody seems to teach when it comes to practicing scales
and arpeggios with your voice if you've been following my channel
for any length of time you know that i am not a big fan of scale exercises or arpeggios
or those traditional sort of marching okay let's get warmed up or let's go up and down
and then go up a key and then go up and down and then go i'm not a fan of that why am i not a fan
because we tend to plow through those things we tend to have this checkbox mentality
and we end up uh doing something like this
la la la la la la la okay uh uh what's wrong with my face
what's wrong with my neck i've seen this happen so often where we start with the best intentions
we're trying to warm up and as we go higher and higher we're we have these expectations
on ourself that we need to be relaxed that we need to but we also need to be
uh getting the you know hitting the pitches and staying on rhythm and trying to not be tense in
the neck and then all these things we're not supposed to do or supposed to do end up making
us tense and a lot of times we hold that tension in our face it starts in our face and you'll see
people and i used to do this too you'll see people when they're doing the scale exercises
they get their they get their like pained singing face even though they're not singing anything
they're just doing warm-ups or they're just doing little exercises this is not necessary and
you're not experiencing your voice at all you're plowing you're trying to get some you're trying
to do a scale exercise because someone told you to do a scale exercise this doesn't work here's
the better way if you're going to use scales and it's actually really fun slow it way down
have an experiential objective rather than the checklist objective
i'm going to be using my ear a lot as i sing scales or little parts of scales or arpeggios
over the musical context we're going to be going over today i've always said a great ear is a huge
part of what makes a great voice if you'd like more help with your own ear training
i have a free ear training course that i have done with a good buddy of mine and fellow youtuber
david wallerman some of you might recognize david from my free your voice course that
many of you have signed up for click the link in the description below and you can
join that free ear training course and i'll give you some tools to drastically improve
your musical ear we want to think about each note that we sing in a scale
as a unique experience for us to dive into now this is very useful in terms of warming up but
it's also very useful in terms of just general discovery yes you can use it to come to terms
with where your voice is but you can also use it to develop possibility in your voice something
that you would never do if you were just plowing through a scale exercise or an arpeggio exercise
if you're going la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la yes you might be
feeling things out but i'm going to say that if we put ourselves in a meditative context where we put
a pitch center behind us and we go super slow and take this scale in a way that helps us both wake
up and awaken the resonance sensations in our face and in our body in general we're going to
warm up really without trying and we're going to experience our voice afresh and without any
strings attached you're not being asked to perform you're not being asked to accomplish you're only
being asked to experience i'm going to put on a drone and i use these drones in my course all
the time for for different exercises i'm also just for my own fun i'm going to put on a little bit of
effects i'm going to listen in headphones as i'm listening to the drone this is a c drone
i'm going to go up to the fifth of c
now rather than thinking about all these things that i need to do which
are going to create pained singer's face i'm going to instead intentionally
and you can see great singers have a way of exuding the most amazing energy and still having
a relatively uh face so i'm gonna do that this looseness blue is going to allow me to experience
the vibrations of each note in my face in new ways so instead of doing law i'm going to say
mama and i'm going to experience the vibration of the
all over my face and i'm going to make sure that i'm hitting this in a way that
is completely obligation free to the rest of my body so i can be very relaxed
then i'm going to introduce natural dynamics into each note i'm going to slow it way down
notice i'm staying in a very comfortable area of my range
in other words i'm not attacking any note the minute i start to feel any sort of
neck yuck it's not time for me to go don't be tense don't be tense don't be tense
it's time to flop again a lot of times i'll do this with a chair
with a back on it i know this flies in the face of a lot of things but
now i'm going to place the resonance differently
my
feel it in my face on the ms release and project mom
start with the lower larynx if you want and practice arching each
now i'm going to go to a different scale a different mood and see what it sort of
inspires and what you're going to notice is that as you continue down this road of experiencing
the placement of different notes how your voice feels being completely relaxed and feeling the
vibrations drive you what you're doing rather than trying to accomplish something or finish
something you're going to start really enjoying how your voice feels and then you're going to
be surprised by the type of sounds that come out someone go to a minor sound gesture mom
let's do like a harmonic minor thing
my
i'm just letting my voice do what it wants to i'm not trying to accomplish uh
or or stick to a a time or a certain set of notes
i'm letting my voice sort of awaken to what it wants to do and experiencing the joy of that
minor thirds a major third that's fun my
let's work with a different vowel and let your voice do what it does remember everything is very
subdued in your face
throat singing there it's all
good
mummy me me
now as i speed up am i still feeling relaxed if i'm not feeling relaxed i'm doing something wrong
if i'm getting into this me me me me me me me me me me me me me me
against myself we don't want the expectation of a scale exercise to use us right we don't
want to give ourselves over to it so that we get tense so we have something to accomplish that we
have something to do we want to use the scales or arpeggios or little ditty we want to use it
in a way that only feeds this calm meditative completely released state
so that we can experience the awakening of our voice this is what it means to truly warm up
and this is also what it means to experience the resonance in your voice therefore allowing
you to discover how to get great tone or how to place certain words certain vowels
to get the desired level of dynamics and interaction with the phrases you want to
sing can they happen with rhythmic rote scale exercises yes but only if you have this mindset
and i in all my years of singing have not been able to get this mindset from rote scale exercises
that's why i don't like them so if you're going to practice scales practice them like this
again if you want more help on locking your ear so that you can hear possibilities over
stuff like this and in your own songs and in your own writing
a great ear makes a better vocalist by far click the link below and join my free ear
training course that i've done with my buddy and fellow youtuber david walleman see you there