How to Practice Choral Music at Home

Warm-Up

1. Physical: stretch and align your spine, shoulders, neck, torso, and face
2. Breath: taking low, deep, breaths in and out a couple of times through the mouth
3. Sigh: sigh on oo starting from high to low with maintaining a raised soft-palate
4. Hum/Lip Trills: begin creating sound with D R M R D on a hum, or D M S M D on lip
trills going up or down by half-steps
5. Melodic: nee-yeh-yah going up, ha-ha-ha going up, yah going down, zee-yah going up

*It is important to repeat any of these steps if more time is needed to find the right sound
for choral singing like in class!

Have a piano at home? Use it! Don’t have one? Get a keyboard app like GarageBand. Having
a keyboard to help you get through tricky parts in your music will help you move quicker!

Solfege Work

What is do? Identify the key signature.

Sing a scale in that key on solfege.

Start singing through tricky parts of your music on solfege.

- Can’t figure out an interval? Not sure how to get from one note to the next?
- Play the skip on piano. Sing that skip a couple of times until you feel comfortable.
- REPEAT tricky sections on solfege until you can sing through the whole phrase right
THREE times in a row.

Sing through the whole piece on solfege using solfege hand signs.
- This can be done a capella or with a recording provided on GoogleClassroom.
- Repeat process until you can comfortably and accurately sing through the whole
piece on solfege.
- Circle or mark tricky sections in your music. Ask Ms. Karim next class about them!
Text Work

How to transfer solfege onto words? Can sing it on solfege but the words trip you up?

Do one section at a time.

- Switching to text is the beginning of the memorization process. Repeat sections until
you can comfortably sing that specific section on text.
- Move on to the next section in the music and repeat the process.
- Sing the text, but still use your hand signs so you are still thinking of the solfege!

Put sections together.

- Once you feel confident about different sections, start to chunk them together.
- Make sure that you don’t go from small sections to the whole song… create steps for
yourself so you don’t get overwhelmed. Baby steps is key!

Technique
- Think about tall, open vowels.
- Think about being exactly in tune and singing the right notes.
- Think about diction and having proper choral pronunciation.
- Questions? Ask Ms. Karim next class!

YOU CAN DO IT
YOU WILL ROCK IT
YOU ARE AWESOME