Why Sing Scales?
If you take lessons for voice or any other instrument, you’re going to find yourself singing or playing scales. Even if you play a non-pitched instrument like the drum set, your teacher will give you a list of exercises to practice between lessons. The oddly specific, repetitive drills can feel a bit like your high school math homework: theory with little-to-no real world application. However, we promise you that, unlike your 10th grade trigonometry class, you’ll actually use what you learn running drills every time you sing.
Why sing scales?
While on the surface, scale exercises might look a lot like warmups, they serve a very different purpose: warmups help us prevent injury by gently preparing our voices for singing while exercises help us deepen skills we’ll use later. Just like a soccer player will hit the gym and run drills to hone their skills in the weeks leading up to a game, scales and drills allow a singer to refine their technique before hitting the stage in a more targeted way than simply singing a song. Think of vocal exercises and drills like the sets of squats, crunches, or leg lifts an athlete might do to target specific muscle groups.
As singers, we use multiple complex muscle groups from our abdomens up to our faces to create sound. Most of these muscles are smaller and harder to observe working than, say, a runner’s quads, but they’re as important to great singing as a sprinter’s muscles are to winning a race. Vocal exercises that specifically target the muscles involved in breath support or the tiny muscles that stretch and relax our vocal folds let us sing more consistently and confidently during real world performances.
In addition to targeting specific skills, the repetitive nature of scales has its own benefit. Repetition is key to learning new skills, particularly for moving those skills from short-term to long-term memory. With enough repetition, we’re able to use these techniques without consciously calling upon them. This is crucial for vocalists; a common complaint from students just starting lessons is how hard it is to focus on breathing, posture, and the thousand other aspects of good vocal technique while singing a song. Scales, as boring as they might seem, help make these tasks second nature so you don’t have to actively think about whether or not your soft pallet is lifted while belting out high notes on stage.
What can I learn from scales and how does it apply to my singing?
This is an understandable question; there aren’t many songs that involve just singing up and down a major scale on a random vowel sound. The skills we take away from running drills are subtler and more complex than that. Exercises can help you develop your breath support, accuracy, control, flexibility, and even train your ear.
We’ll start with your breath, the foundation of all good singing. While there are some drills like lip trills that are vey specifically designed to challenge your breath support, almost every exercise your teacher gives you will help you strengthen and understand your breathing. Repetitive exercises give us the chance to practice taking short but effective breaths, also known as catch-breaths, between each scale. Learning to take effective catch-breaths is a crucial skill. There’s not always time for a long, full breath between phrases during an actual song; long phrases or fast passages become much easier to sing when you can take quick but effective breaths. Similarly, long exercises challenge you to complete a phrase on single breath; they can demonstrate how long of a phrase you actually can sing on one breath and, overtime, will help you make it through longer sections before needing to breathe. Knowing how many bars or beats you can sing before needing to take a breath can help you plan where to breathe during a song so you don’t find yourself running out of air mid phrase or trying to awkwardly sneak a breath in the middle of a word.
Accuracy of pitch and rhythm is fundamental to good musicianship. As a vocalist, you don’t have keys to press or frets to place your fingers over that you know will create a pitch; you have to hear the pitch in your mind and trust your body to reproduce it accurately. This takes a lot of practice and drills are a great tool to work that skill. Exercises that call for “arrow notes” or notes where you land on the correct pitch rather than sliding up to it, are a great way to develop pitch accuracy. Drills that help with ear training - or your ability to hear and recognize intervals, chords, and rhythm - pair well with exercises that boost accuracy; after all, it’s hard to know if you’re on the note if you haven’t practiced hearing the note.
Long story short, there’s a drill to help you develop almost every aspect of vocal technique, and many pull double-duty just thanks to the repetitive nature of scales. Whether you struggle transitioning between your head and chest voice, want to extend your range, or want to improve your melismas and runs; there’s exercise that can help you build those skills. Once you find the right ones for you, it’s just a matter of adding them to your daily practice.
How do I add scales to my singing routine?
Make your mundane moments musical
Adding drills to your daily routine doesn’t have to be a big todo. In fact, they’re a great thing to sneak into found time during your day or while performing tasks that don’t require a lot of focus. For example, we love singing through a few exercises in the car while driving to work or errands, or while getting ready in the morning. Your practice sessions don’t have to be long; even ten minutes of good practice a day is a fantastic habit to build. Prerecorded practice aids, like Zelda Sheldon’s Voice Workouts for Singing, are a great tool to make exercises easy. By downloading practice tracks to your phone, you can simply put on your headphones and be guided through an exercise routine anywhere, anytime.
Make it fun
One of the biggest challenges to maintaining a practice of singing scales is that they can be, well, boring. While singing through your drills as written is important to get their full intended impact, you can play with them to add interest if things are getting stale. Similar to the experimentation we discussed in our article on finding your unique voice, you might try singing through some of your exercises in cartoony voices, in a different part of register, or by scooping up or down to notes rather than singing arrow notes. You can try other vowel sounds or make exaggerated mouth and lip movements while running through your scales. Not only can these add a sense of play to your practice, they can help you workout different parts of your range and discover different dimensions of your voice.
Gamifying your practice through apps can also help make scales more interesting. Metronome apps (Metronome Beats is one of our favorites) can make rhythm fun and help you speed up and slow down your scales or practice singing them over a groove. Pitch matching apps or websites like Match My Sound can measure your pitch accuracy and help you visualize the steadiness of your pitch. If gamifying things isn’t for you, we always recommend having a good virtual piano app on your phone so you can practice pitch matching or simply find starting note for scales without a physical keyboard nearby.
Make it effective
Of course, the most important thing about any kind of repetitive practice like drills is that it’s good practice. If you repeat anything enough, it will eventually become muscle memory - including bad technique that can lead to vocal strain or injury. Working with a voice coach and using recorded practice aids like Zelda Sheldon’s Voice Workouts for Singing can help you choose drills that build good technique.
Once you find the right exercises, it’s important to make sure you’re practicing them effectively; for example, while we encourage you to experiment with slides and other voices while running scales, you should treat it like dessert: a treat after a nutritious meal of more structured drills. If you only ever run your scales by sliding up to notes, you’re missing out on the opportunity to develop your pitch accuracy by drilling arrow notes. Similarly, if you only do your exercises in a cartoon voice, you’re getting the same level of skill development as a runner who only trains doing silly walks; you’re going to get very good at something, but it might not be what you’re hoping for. Additionally, we recommend warming up before starting your vocal workout, just like you might stretch or walk before starting a run. Exercises can test your limits, not unlike singing a challenging song, and a good warm up can protect your voice and help you get the most out of your drills. (Check out Zelda’s warm up guide or our article on warmups if you want help warming up.)
Get Your Voice a Personal Trainer and Book a Lesson Today
We hope you’re feeling more inspired to dive into vocal exercises than you were about your high school math homework. Scales, as boring as they might seem on the surface, offer so many opportunities to learn and strengthen your singing technique. If you’re looking to start a regular vocal exercise routine, download Zelda Sheldon’s Voice Workouts for Singing or set up a lesson. Whether you’re warming up, working out, or taking the stage, don’t forget to love your voice!
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