How To Build a Database of Vocal Warmups

How To Build a Database of Vocal Warmups

Vocal warmups are paramount to any singer’s success. They are the key to maintaining good vocal health and building the voice. I’ve often heard that doing warmups/vocalizes is more important than learning to sing new repertoire; it’s where the skills are built, and the songs are just where those skills are applied.

Over time, we’re exposed to dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of different vocal warmups. We can collect them from different choirs we sing in, teachers we study with, conferences we attend, and research we do (hey, that’s how you ended up here!). However, we often find that while we remember our favorite ones, a majority of the vocalizes we’re exposed to get lost in the sea of information we’re exposed to. After all, brains are made to have ideas, not store them. That’s where the Vocal Warmup Database comes in.

How do you remember all your vocal warmups?

As a choral director and voice teacher, I am responsible for providing my singers with comprehensive training that includes a variety of different vocal warmups. I found myself recycling my favorite 10-15 vocalizes that worked best for me but were not necessarily the most effective for the diverse singers I led. Conversely, I would also come up short when my singers had a specific problem, and I knew deep in my soul that I had a warmup that would help solve the issue, but I couldn’t remember what it was for the life of me.

One day, I’d had enough and decided to write down every warm-up I knew, what it targeted, and the best use cases for each. When I was starting out, I also recorded a voice memo demonstrating how each vocalize went. Over the past few years, I have honed my system to be practical, helpful, and efficient to keep up with it and easily add to it with little to no friction.

Here is how I built my Vocal Warmups Database.

You might also like: How To Build a Vocal Warmup Routine

Choose your method

The first step is to decide where your database will live. Remember, the goal here is practicality and efficiency; taking a page from Atomic Habits, ask yourself, “How can I put it in an obvious place? How can I make it easy to do? How can I make it satisfying to add to?” Even though Notion is pretty, if you aren’t using it every day, then using it as a tool won’t make you very likely to use it.

Some options you might consider are:

• Google Sheets: If you use Google Drive daily, setting up your database in a spreadsheet might be the best option. I use this method and recommend it to my students.
• Notion: If you’re an avid Notion user, this is the perfect place to add your voice builders. It is a powerful organizer with ample options to manipulate your data precisely as needed.
• Index cards: If you’re less digital-savvy and more of an analog lover, then getting physical index cards may be a good option for you. I would recommend the colored ones so that you can color-code your categories.

You may also use a simple Word doc or piece of paper. For a long time, I had a list of my favorite 20 warmups on a piece of paper, and whenever I had a long teaching day (12 back-to-back private lessons), I would cycle through them so that I wouldn’t get bored doing the same vocalizes 12 times.  This worked for a while, but I eventually outgrew the list and wanted an easier way to sort for specific warmups to target different vocal issues. 

Define your headers

After selecting your “home” for the database, it’s time to define the “rooms.” Essentially, these are the columns of a spreadsheet. To simplify my life, I’ve decided to only stick with five headers, but you may add a few more if they serve you best.

The headers I have are:

• Category: what type of warmup this is
• Name: a title that acts as a “quick-hand” for remembering the vocalize
• Execution: a brief description of how to do the warmup, sometimes including the range it works best in
• Tags: this column serves me for sorting my choral and vocal warmups, but it can be used for anything. If you’re a private voice teacher, you may tag them by difficulty, age, voice type, etc. Also, don’t be afraid to leave the tags blank!
• Notes: here is where I type buzzwords that I might search for, like “soft palate,” “young singers,” or additional instruction that takes the exercise a step further than the basic execution.

If you want to include more columns, you could have one for a link to a voice memo or article explaining the benefit or in-depth detail of how to do it. You could also have one for the source or where you found the exercise. The possibilities are endless; tailor the spreadsheet to your needs and allow it to evolve over time. 

Select your categories

The most crucial part of building my database was having a section for my categories. As we train voices, there are specific areas we want to tackle every day. A warmup routine would never consist of 10 breathing exercises and one diction exercise. You also wouldn’t want to do a whole day of range-building warmups. Organizing the function of each warmup by category ensures that you are creating a holistic routine and hitting all of the essential aspects of singing.

I currently have eight categories, but this is constantly in flux. Keeping the number trim and general is important because that’s what is most functional to me. Having 50 categories for 100 warmups will make navigating the database confusing and challenging. Having under 10 keeps it manageable. I rarely do more than ten different warmups per day, so having one per category is what works best for me.

The categories I use are:

• Physical
• Breath
• SOVT
• Diction
• Intonation
• Flexibility
• Misc

The miscellaneous category encompasses many of the warmups that would have their own category if I had 50 different categories. They may appear simple on the surface but target nuanced parts of the voice like tongue tension, forward placement, and vocal color. 

You might also like: 5 Warmups I do as a Professional Singer

Load your backlog

Now we’re getting to the fun part! It’s time to brain dump every warmup you can remember into the spreadsheet. Start with the ones you experience every day, then work your way through the ones you no longer do but remember from your high school/college days. 

Set a timer for 10 minutes and write down as many as possible. If you get stuck, start with just one you know, and then think about any modifications you’ve ever seen to that one. For example, if you can only think of lip trills, you might consider adding lip bubbles, tongue trills, or humming since these are all related to lip trills.

In the beginning, I would caution against using Google to fill up your spreadsheet. Remember, we want this to be functional. If you’ve never done a warmup but add it because you researched it, then when you’re preparing to teach for the day, these “unknowns” will just be noise. Stick to what you know, and maybe just add one new one per day. If it works and you like it, then add it to the spreadsheet.

Optimize for adding new vocalizes

This database should be a living, breathing document. Adding to it should be seamless and effortless. I’ve used a couple of hacks to make this process easier for me; you may develop other tactics, but the point is to think of optimization so that this database never becomes an overgrown forest of messy vocal warmups.

Ways I have optimized my database:

• Conditional formatting: I’ve preset colors for my categories and tags so that as soon as I type in a word, it’ll turn the color that corresponds to it. That way, I can quickly find targeted exercises at a glance.
• Adding to the top: If I’m on my laptop, I’ll add new vocalizes to the top of the spreadsheet instead of the bottom so that they are top of mind as I decide which ones to use on a given day. If I’m adding them from my phone, I’ll do my best since the app is a bit more finicky, but that usually means adding them to the bottom and having to remember to move them to the top when I return to my laptop.
• Star it: I have my spreadsheet starred within my Google Drive so that I can access it with just a few taps. This is especially helpful on mobile or if I’m in the middle of a lesson and a student has a specific issue to target.

You’re done!

If you’ve followed the steps outlined above, you should have a functional database filled with your current knowledge and are ready to expand to new ideas you discover. Now, you won’t have to worry about remembering all those gems you’ve learned over the years. This spreadsheet has empowered me as a director, teacher, and singer. I hope it will do the same for you.