Vocal Cool-Downs 101

But loads of singers asking me, "How do I cool down my voice? I'm just now hearing about this." I feel like we all know a lot about vocal warmups, or at least we've heard about them, know that ideally if we do a few exercises to warm up our voice, meaning get our vocal cords ready to move from speaking level to a much broader, more athletic range and singing level.

We're all aware of that and we know its benefits.

Whether we do them or not, I highly recommend you do them.

But people don't know as much about vocal cool downs, and research shows vocal cool downs, that is taking your voice after athletic activity, after a big practice or after a gig, and doing exercises that then move the voice from that broader, more athletic range back to speaking voice, back to neutral, back to less effort.

Research shows that doing regular vocal cool downs actually contribute more to your overall vocal health, consistency, and longevity.

So vocal cool downs do not have to be long.

Vocal cool downs can be two minutes.

I mean, 30 seconds, to be totally honest, can make a difference.

And if I'm gonna do more than, you know, three to five minutes of a vocal cool down, I'm not vocalizing more than that.

I am stretching the body.

I might be massaging the jaw, releasing the tongue, right? Getting some tension released in my body, which is my instrument, but vocalizing a few minutes or less and you are likely good to go.

So as I said before, what we wanna do is exercises that take us from this broader range back to speech.

So the great thing about that is you can use a lot of the same sounds, a lot of the same exercises that feel good for you that you use for a warmup.

But in a warmup, we start at speech, we expand our range.

In a cool down, we're gonna start at a broader range, bring it back to speech.

So I'm gonna give you a few different exercises in this episode that I personally love for a vocal cool down so you can play with them in your own voice.