Your first warm-up: humming before talking
Okay, so here's the thing about the air up here. It's dry. Genuinely, physically dry, and it's not just your skin and your garden that notice, it's your voice. Your vocal folds are two little bands of muscle and tissue, and dry air pulls moisture off them faster than you'd think. At 4,600 feet, with the humidity what it is in Utah County most of the year, your voice shows up to rehearsal already a little parched before you've sung a note.
So we hum first. Every time. This isn't stalling and it isn't me padding the hour so you think you got your money's worth. Warming up is the actual work. Skip it enough weeks in a row and you'll notice, usually on a Tuesday when your voice feels like sandpaper for no reason you can name. There's a reason. You just didn't hum on Sunday.
Why humming, specifically
Humming is low effort, high return. It gets air moving over the folds without asking them to do anything dramatic. No big vowels, no reaching for a note, no pressure. It's basically a systems check. If something's tight or off, you'll feel it in a hum before you'd hear it in a full "ahh."
It also gets your resonance going in the right place, up in the mask of your face, behind your nose and cheekbones, instead of jammed down in your throat. That's the sensation you're chasing. A good hum should buzz a little against your lips and the bridge of your nose. If you don't feel any buzz at all, you're probably pushing from your throat, which is exactly the habit we're trying to unlearn.
How to actually do it at home
You don't need a piano for this, though it helps if you've got one, or a keyboard app on your phone, or honestly just your own ear.
- Start in the middle of your range. Not your lowest note, not your highest. Just comfortable, like you're humming while you do dishes.
- Hum for four counts, rest for four counts. Slow. Don't rush it.
- Slide. Once you're loose, hum a slow slide from a low note up to a higher one and back down, like a little sigh with pitch attached. Sirens, some people call it. I just call it the slide.
- Do this for about five minutes. Not thirty seconds. Five minutes. I know that sounds like a lot for humming, but that's roughly what it takes to actually change something, not just feel like you did.
While you're doing this, keep your jaw loose. Let your shoulders drop. Most people hum with a clenched jaw without noticing, and it defeats the whole point.
I'll bring a metronome to class for pacing on some of this, and I should tell you now, mine runs about six beats per minute fast. I bought it on a Costco run for a dollar fifty and I've just... kept using it, mentally subtracting the difference in my head like that's a normal thing to do. It's not really about precise tempo for humming anyway. It's about consistency. Slow and steady beats fast and impressive here, every time.
The opinion part
Here's where I'll say something a little contrarian, because it comes up early and it might as well come up now. Most choirs think warming up is about volume, about getting your instrument "big" before you sing loud. I don't think that's right. Blend matters more than volume, and warming up quietly, gently, in a hum, is actually training the habit you want for the whole rehearsal. You're not warming up to get loud. You're warming up to get flexible and to get used to listening to yourself instead of just producing sound and hoping.
If you come in already blasting scales at full voice, you're skipping the part where your voice actually wakes up. You're just proving you can be loud cold, which nobody needed proof of.
A real caution, not a lawyer one
If your throat is sore, actually sore, not just dry-mouth thirsty, don't push through it with singing. Hum gently if you want, but back off anything that hurts. A hoarse voice after a cold or a rough night's sleep needs water and rest more than it needs practice. I'd rather you miss a day of humming than push a strained voice into something that takes two weeks to recover from. That's not me being cautious for the sake of it. I've watched people talk themselves hoarse trying to "sing through it" and it never goes the way they hope.
Also, drink water. More than you think you need. The dry air pulls moisture out of you all day, not just when you're singing, and your voice is downstream of your whole body being a little dehydrated most of the time up here.
Before next time
Try the five-minute hum at home once or twice this week, ideally somewhere you won't feel weird doing it, your car counts. Just notice what it feels like when the buzz shows up, because that's the sensation we'll keep chasing together in class.