Hey Chris Liepe here with special guest Lukas Magyar from the band Veil of Maya
and I've got three tips for singing better live
if you enjoy these tips and you want to go deeper with Lucas and his approach click the link below
and join the free warm-ups course Lucas magyar's warm-ups to outrun vocal fatigue tip number one
know your approach you're gonna have the material that you have to perform live break all those
parts up into little itty bitty sections how do I want to execute this part what Dynamics do I
want to use go through those parts over and over individually line by line even sometimes syllable
by syllable to really figure out how you need to execute each little tiny part that goes into the
whole piece so you don't start by singing these songs all the way through to learn them no you use
recording too right to make this happen I'll do a lot of like video or audio recordings just from
my phone because then you can do it anywhere you know you don't need to be in the studio atmosphere
you can just record it on on a device that you have a big thing out there is like oh you know
I'm not going to record my vocals in the studio a little piece by piece because I want to be able to
do it live but what I'm hearing you say is that by taking the approach of recording things piece by
piece even in an informal way you train yourself to know your approach so that you can do it live
it's actually the opposite of what conventional wisdom would say right oh you want to sing this
song all the way through practicing it all the way through well maybe eventually right but not before
you really know how you're going to approach every little Nuance exactly the way you want to yeah and
it takes time and you're going to run through you know 14 different ways that you don't like but as
long as you know what you want and you know how to create those sounds then you can start to build it
into context that's counter-intuitive as that is it's so valuable tip number two focal safe cardio
in order to be in shape enough a big part of that is bodily Fitness right because singing and
Performing is tiresome and it obviously increases your heart rate so if your cardio and your body
can't handle the amount of energy you're exerting your voice is going to fall apart pretty quickly
because you're trying desperately just to get air and to like keep moving so as you're practicing
for singing live do you intentionally insert movements that you wouldn't otherwise insert
if you were just sitting at your house right like sometimes because you I mean live you move around
a ton I mean you're you're running back and forth and turning around and jumping and and that takes
a toll I've I've over exaggerated it to the point where I vocalize like wow cycling right and not
like slowly like extensive bike rides and then I'm not going to do the whole set while I'm doing that
like no good luck but your physical activity is so over the top exaggerated that just vocalizing
anything at that point is going to be difficult and if you can get through a couple passages of
a song when your body's literally winded that's that does a lot for you but if you know your
approach based on what you were doing before that becomes muscle memory that that comes across uh
through your body more easily so you don't have to think about it as much while you're performing
live and then you introduce the cardio aspect of it into the practicing right and that helps you
be prepared for when you are slightly winded so that you can still do your approach right yeah
because you can know it forward and backwards but if your body's not just if you're not gonna
have the energy to produce it you're out of luck so what are some yes he's mentioned cycling what
else do you do that's that's good for the voice and good for you being able to vocalize while
you do it I mean there's a ton of things you can do to accelerate your heart rate whether you get
on the ground do a bunch of mountain climber and calisthenics and things of that nature you know
running is obviously great I try to match the duration of the set if possible that's if I'm
going to keep it at a moderate pace so there's a couple different ways I'll go about it I'll
have my moderate pace and it's like all right I really want to match the duration of the set but
then I'll have my like really crazy pace which is basically I want to have high intensity and
just to burn myself out so keeping cardio safe and beneficial for your singing what are some things
to watch out for avoiding bad weather if you're going to do your cardio and you want to like run
and it's raining out or it's cold you might not want to do that because that can severely impact
your vocal Health in a negative way so weather bad keep the cardio inside perhaps obviously staying
hydrated before during and after the cardio workout so that way while you're doing this
exercise your vocal folds aren't just drying out on you and then it's great to take anywhere from a
half hour maybe to an hour in between your cardio and your vocal training so your body has time to
sort of reset before you start to physically exert energy all over again especially if you're going
to be doing a show later how far in between will you leave oh sure I mean yeah if you actually
have to perform that day or record that day you're not just like training or rehearsing I would try
to get your cardio done as early as possible and then you just have the rest of the day
to reset because you don't want to be feeling any negative effects of that cardio if you have a real
performance if you have to train for the day and you're a little fatigued from it like not a big
deal that's a good challenge but you don't want that challenge wow you need to be at your best
right so know your approach voice safe cardio and isolate and reinsert back into context okay how is
that different than know your approach because you're already stepping as you figure out what
you're doing what does this mean so some parts of your your set you're likely going to find are more
difficult than other parts so this is after you have started to sing them all the way through and
you identify problem areas okay so you're going you're almost going back to know your approach
but as a reaction to putting it all together yes because there's a difference between executing
this part exactly how you want and then executing it within the context of a song so if you have a
really difficult part in the middle of a song your body is going to be way more worn out by the time
it gets there than if you isolate especially if you're in the middle of a whole set right yeah so
by isolating problem areas you get more reps there so you can get your body to start to produce those
more efficiently if your body can produce that isolated area more efficiently than it can or
could a week ago then in the context of the song in the set it's not going to feel so bad it'll
be a lot easier it's amazing how much uh how many parallels there are between this kind of approach
and just like regular Fitness training 100 I make that students like when I teach they're always
like it's like weightlifting right like yeah dude that's exactly what it is um it's a it's a group
of muscles and they get exhausted like anything else and I think the common thing that happens is
we wake up and our voices just tend to work every day we talk right right in that way because of
that we forget how much effort actually goes into producing our voice but it starts to become really
apparent when we do things that are unnatural to our bodies sure so then you start to realize oh
you got to take these little incremental steps to make this more feasible the same way if you're I
want my goal is to bench press 300 you're probably not I'm not doing that today right that's going to
take me a while to work up to it yeah when we're isolating Parts there's another step that we can
take to sort of expedite our progress right so when the part is starting to feel just a little
bit better we can Loop it and now we can flow right back into it as if it was the very next
part of the song because now you're forcing your body to produce it for longer than it's actually
going to have to in the context so it's just kind of a way of almost like putting ankle weights on
when you're running or putting chains on the bench when you're benching and driving home
the muscle memory of that specific spot so that when you get to that part in the show or in the
song that muscle memory kicks in even more because you've you've gone over and over again all right
know your approach voice safe cardio isolate and reinsert great tips this is only the beginning
if you like Lucas's approach and insights there's a lot more in the free voice course Linked In the
video description below Lucas magyar's warm-ups to outrun vocal fatigue we'll see you there