ANST - Court Herald Style

[Mary Temple]

>Pendaran responds:
>
>When I warm up my vocal chords, I start out with deep breaths from the 
>diaphragm to get into the proper breathing mode. I then start with 
>some deep pitched, low rumblings and "mee mee mee" type stuff. After a 
>few minutes, I bring up both the pitch and level of my voice I little 
>at a time until I am "quietly" projecting my voice to a few feet 
>around me. By then, I usually feel ready to talk to a few hundred 
>people at once.
>
>The thing is, I am not a singer and have had no training in voice 
>projection. The stuff that I do, I just came up on my own and they 
>tend to work for me. However, if there are any singers or actors  who 
>have had some training in voice warming and projecting, please comment 
>here. I'm sure that you could give some better advice and I would love 
>to hear it as I'm always looking to improve my heralding skills.
>
>-Pendaran
>
This sounds a lot like what my voice instructors used to advise us to 
do. We sang a lot of scales for warm ups, using different tempos, 
holding some notes longer than others, and different sounds. "Mee" is a 
different mouth position from "ahhh", and we'd go from one to the other 
to remind us to sing w/ our mouths OPEN. One particular exercise had us 
singing every vowel. Other times we'd just count the notes as we went up 
the scale. One of my teachers actually had us sing the old Egg McMuffin 
jingle - "there's more in the middle of an egg mcmuffin than an egg in 
the middle of a muffin". We'd gradually get faster each time - the 
emphasis being on pronunciation. It's kind of hard (for me, at least) to 
describe vocal exercises in text, and  much easier to 'show'.

As for breathing, that's a bit easier - if the shoulders come up when 
inhaling, it's not a deep breath. One of my teachers would walk around 
the room and 'lean' on our shoulders while we were warming up to remind 
us. The diaphragm (sp?) should be doing the work, and if it's being done 
correctly, the abdomen will expand on inhalation and contract on 
exhalation. Proper posture makes this much easier to achieve. Holding a 
note for 32 counts was much easier once I started sitting/standing up 
straight!

Lady Catriona Rowley


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