Day 1 Vocal Warm Up for Beginners: Start Here

Imagine sitting down to sing and your voice just feels… tight. That's what this 7-day series fixes. In Day 1, you’ll discover the beginner warm up that builds your foundation, no talent required, just the right exercises in the right order.

Start by checking in with your voice

Before we warm up, I want you to do something simple: rate your voice on a scale from 1 to 10.

How does your voice feel today?

Keep that number somewhere because we’re going to come back to it. My invitation is to follow this warm-up series every day for the next seven days and notice what changes in your voice.

And remember: this is only a vocal warm-up. If warming up consistently can already change how your voice feels, imagine what becomes possible when you start working on your singing beyond the warm-up.

Begin with a simple lip trill

We’re starting with an exercise I recommend for just about everyone: the lip trill.

If getting your lips to trill is difficult, place your fingers near the corners of your mouth. Don’t push too far back or too far up—find that comfortable middle position that helps your lips move freely.

Then we’ll take the lip trill through the exercise together and gently start warming up the voice.

If you find that you absolutely need your fingers to maintain the trill, that may give us some information about your breath support. But that’s a conversation for another day.

For now, just focus on getting your voice moving.

Singing happens in two phases

Here’s something important to understand about singing: it consists of two phases.

Phase one is hearing.

Before you can sing something accurately, you need to know where the music is going. What note are you actually supposed to sing?

Phase two is producing the sound.

That’s when your vocal cords vibrate and you physically sing the note.

In our next exercise, we’re going to focus specifically on phase one by developing your internal hearing.

Can you hear the note before you sing it?

I’ll play one note.

Your first job isn’t to immediately sing it. Instead, hear that note inside your mind first.

Then sing it out loud.

Afterward, we’ll check together whether your voice matched the pitch.

And here’s the important part: you don’t need to know whether you were too high or too low. At this stage, we’re simply developing your ability to recognize whether your voice matches the note.

Being off-pitch gives you useful information

What happens if you sing the note and realize you’re off-pitch?

That’s useful information.

If you can hear that the note you sang doesn’t match the note you heard, we have something we can work with.

There may also be a technical reason why a certain note is difficult. If a note is very high in your range, for example, you may need specific vocal techniques to sing it comfortably.

But we’re not focusing on that yet.

Right now, the goal is simply to hear the note internally, sing it and recognize whether the pitches match.

Activate your breath support

Next, we’re moving into breath support.

One part of breath support is diaphragmatic breathing: allowing your belly to expand as you breathe in and engaging your abdominal muscles as you breathe out or sing.

But in this exercise, we’re focusing on another piece.

I like to call it your “coughing muscle.”

The actual muscle is the transverse abdominis, and we want to activate it with short he, he, he, ha sounds.

With every sound, pay attention to your belly. You should feel those abdominal muscles actively working.

This isn’t about keeping your stomach completely still. We want those muscles involved.

Wake up your chest voice with twang

Now it’s time to activate your chest voice with some twang.

And this one doesn’t need to sound pretty.

In fact, make it ugly!

We’ll use a bright, exaggerated neigh, neigh, neigh sound. Forget about creating a beautiful tone for a moment and allow yourself to exaggerate the sound.

The purpose here is to open up and activate your chest voice.

Find your head voice

Chest voice activated? Beautiful.

Now give me a little “yoohoo!”

That lighter, almost princess-like sound helps us find and activate the head voice. We’ll take that feeling into the next exercise and allow the voice to stay light as we move through the notes.

Don’t force it. Let the sound stay easy.

Bring chest voice and head voice together

Now we’ve activated both registers, it’s time to start bringing them together.

This next exercise works toward your mix voice.

We begin in chest voice, move into head voice and then come back down into chest voice. Instead of treating these parts of your voice as completely separate things, we’re practicing moving between them.

Let the transition happen and notice what you feel.

You warmed up your voice—now test it

Virtual high five.

You just warmed up your voice, and that’s not a small thing.

But before you finish for today, I want you to do one more thing: go sing a song.

Any song.

Don’t overthink the technique. Just sing it and then ask yourself:

On a scale from 1 to 10, how does my voice feel and sound today?

Write down your number.

Tomorrow, do the warm-up again and ask yourself the same question. Continue for seven days and start noticing what changes when you consistently give your voice this kind of attention.

Ready to Go Deeper? Join the Vocal Freedom Practice Hub for just $1.

This is a shorter version of the full high notes practice inside the Vocal Freedom Practice Hub. Ready for the complete session?

👉 Start your $1 trial of the Practice Hub