 My name is Erika Merritt. I'm a local singer and songwriter and today I'm here to talk to you about singing. We will cover how to prepare before singing or how to prepare to sing. We will go through body and facial exercises as well as addressing nervousness and anxiousness that comes along with singing. Thinking can be so rewarding. It's one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I usually feel about 10 times better after I sing. So before doing so I like to center myself so that I can just focus on singing. The first thing I like to do is something called a body check or a sintering exercise. I'm going to name various parts of your body and as I name them I want you to check in with them. Oftentimes people say, how are you? And you think about it. This time I want you to feel about it. I'm going to ask you how your body parts are feeling today. All right. As I'm doing this I want you to make sure that you're taking deep breaths in and out as we check through various parts of our body. All right. All right. Let's get started. Beginning with oh and I'm inviting you to close your eyes. You can keep them open if you like. I'm going to close minds not ignoring you. All right. Close your eyes. All right. Let's check in with the bottom of our feet. Moving to our heels, ankles, our shins, which is between our ankle and our knee, that area. Check in. How about our knees? What are your knees feeling like? If they're sore try to relax them. If they're tense try to relax them. Let's move to our thighs. How are those thighs feeling? And your hips and your pelvic area. Pelvic area is between your hips. I'm leaning forward. Sometimes it helps to isolate the pelvic area. All right. Let's go to our stomach. Above your stomach is your diaphragm, your chest, your shoulders, your neck, your chin. How's your chin feeling? If it's tight, let's loosen it up or your jaw that's connected to your chin. Let's go to your jaw, your nose, deep breath through your nose. How about your forehead? The back of your head, back of your neck, behind your shoulders, your shoulder blades, up and down your spine, the middle of your back. Your lower lumbar, which is the lower back, your bottom, behind your thighs, back of your legs, behind your knees, your calves, your keelies, which is right below your calves and again your heels. Now let's go to the bottom of your feet. Let's pretend that there are roots pulling the bottom of your feet downwards, rooted into the ground. At the same time we are going to pretend that there are roots growing out from the top of our head and pulling us straight into the sky so we're being pulled both ways downwards and upwards at the same time. Now I'd like you to think of everything that you want to offer this world and offer your family and your friends. Breathe it in and I mean as far as gratitude, joy, love, those type of things. Let's breathe it in and let's let it out. Open your eyes if they're not already open and that's it. We're centered. The second thing we're going to focus on is how to prepare your face. When we sing we use our face, yes? Well there are lots of tiny muscles in our face and just like any other thing or any other muscle that we use we like to warm them up. The first exercise I'd like to take you through is called the lip trill. It's kind of like making motorboat sounds right? Silly right? Sometimes it's easier to use your hands on your face like this. Push your cheeks up and do it like this. We're going to do that five times in a row and when we do it we're going to go up and down like this with our voice. Okay let's do that five times. First time here we go. I won't use my hands on my cheeks but if it's easier to do this let's do it. I'm a pro at this so I won't use my hands. All right here we go. One take a deep breath and let's begin. If you notice a little tickle above your lip that's normal. Mine's just tickling right now. All right the next thing we're going to focus on is something I like to call the yawning exercise. The yawning exercise allows you to relax your jaw and supports relaxing the whole palate and the back of your throat. Okay so let's try it. You're going to basically act like you're yawning. Let's do it again. Let's go a few more times. Hope I don't fall asleep. Let's try it two more times. Last time great. The next exercise I'd like to walk you through is called lemon face or sour face and smiley face. This is really good for exercising all the muscles in your face. Who knows what it feels like or what it looks like when you taste the lemon. It's like kind of funny right? So we're going to go from lemon face to smiley face. Okay we're going to do that five times in a row. Let me see your lemon face. What does it look like when you taste the lemon? All right lemon face. Hold it. Smiley face. Lemon face. Smiley face. Lemon face. Smiley face. Two more times. Lemon face. Smiley face. Lemon face. Smiley face. Very good. How many feel muscles in your face being stretched just a little bit. I know I do. Very good. Now we're going that our face is all warmed up. We are going to do a little bit of singing. Now before we do that I want to talk about the feelings of nervousness and anxiousness that are associated with singing. I want you to know that when you're singing it's your show okay. Act like there's no one else in the world or no one else in the room and just give it what you got okay. We're going to use the call and response method where I will call something out or sing something out and you'll repeat it. When it's your turn I'll point at you okay. I'll start first excuse me and then I'll point at you and you'll do the exact same thing that I did okay. All right here we go. Now that our face and our mind is all warmed up we should be geared up and ready to try a little bit of singing. This exercise is going to incorporate our yawn or our jaw and now that it's relaxed it should be nice and loose and ready to do this activity all right. We're going to use the call and response method. I'm going to sing something to you and then I'm going to throw it to you and you're going to sing it back. When I'm singing I'll point to myself and when it's your turn I'll go like this and that symbolizes that it's your turn all right. Here we go one two ready and with me today my name is Erica Merritt and this lesson is called preparing to sing.