For the first year of performing, I had a problem I could not diagnose. The first three to four minutes of every show felt flat. Tight. Like I was pushing words through a narrow tube instead of letting them flow. My voice sounded thin, my delivery was stiff, and I could not figure out why.
Then, somewhere around the fifth or sixth minute, something would shift. My voice would open up. The delivery would loosen. The words would start sounding like they belonged to me instead of sounding like I was reading them off an invisible teleprompter. The second half of every show was consistently better than the first half, and I had no idea what was changing.
I reviewed recordings. I analyzed my scripts. I adjusted my opening material, thinking the problem was in the content. Nothing helped. The pattern persisted: flat start, gradual improvement, strong finish.
The answer, when I finally found it, was so simple that I was almost angry nobody had told me earlier. I was not warming up my voice. I was performing on a cold instrument.
The Instrument Analogy
Dan Harlan, in his lecture on magic as theater, talks about Stanislavski’s method adapted for magicians, and the very first of Stanislavski’s seven steps is this: a trained body and voice. Not a talented body and voice. A trained one. One that you have developed awareness of and can control. One that is prepared for the demands of performance.
A singer would never walk on stage without warming up. A pianist would not sit down at a concert and launch into Rachmaninoff without playing scales first. A dancer would not perform without stretching. Every physical discipline acknowledges that the body needs to be prepared before it is asked to perform at its peak.
But performers who primarily use their voice as their instrument — speakers, magicians, mentalists, comedians — routinely skip warm-ups entirely. They walk on stage and expect their vocal instrument to be at peak performance from the first syllable.
It will not be. The vocal cords are muscles. The diaphragm is a muscle. The muscles of the face, jaw, tongue, and lips are muscles. Cold muscles do not perform the same as warm ones. They are less flexible, less responsive, less capable of the subtle adjustments that create dynamic, expressive delivery.
My flat first few minutes were not a performance problem. They were a warm-up problem. My voice was warming up during the first few minutes of the show, and by the time it was warm, I had already established a mediocre tone that I then had to overcome.
The Discovery
I started researching vocal warm-ups the way I research everything — systematically, obsessively, and with the assumption that there would be more to it than I expected. I talked to an acting coach in Vienna. I watched tutorials by vocal coaches. I read about the speaking techniques covered in the Story to Stage communication framework and its approach to vocal delivery. I experimented on myself in hotel rooms across Austria.
What I discovered is that an effective warm-up routine does not need to be long. It does not need to be complicated. It does need to be consistent, and it does need to address specific physical systems.
Here is the routine I have settled on. It takes between seven and ten minutes, and I do it before every performance and most rehearsal sessions. I am going to describe each element in the order I do them, because the order matters.
Step One: Breathing (Two Minutes)
Everything starts with breath. Your voice is powered by air, and if your breathing is shallow — which it will be if you are nervous — your voice will be thin and unsupported.
I start with diaphragmatic breathing. Hand on the belly, not the chest. Inhale through the nose for four counts, feeling the belly expand. Hold for two counts. Exhale through the mouth for six counts, feeling the belly contract. I do this six to eight times.
The exhale is deliberately longer than the inhale. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system and lowers the heart rate. It is simultaneously a vocal warm-up and a nerve-management technique, which is convenient because I need both before performing.
After the breathing cycles, I do a few breath-support exercises. Inhale fully, then exhale on a sustained “sss” sound, trying to make the sound as steady and even as possible for as long as possible. Then repeat with “zzz,” which engages the vocal cords. Then repeat with “vvv,” which engages the lips.
The purpose of these is to establish the connection between breath support and voice production. When the breath is properly connected to the voice, the sound has depth and power without effort. When it is not, you end up pushing from the throat, which is where that thin, strained quality comes from.
Step Two: Humming (One Minute)
Humming is the gentlest way to activate the vocal cords. I start with a comfortable pitch and hum continuously for about thirty seconds, feeling the vibration in my chest, my throat, and my face. Then I slowly slide the pitch up and down, exploring the range without straining.
The goal is not volume or range. The goal is resonance. I want to feel the hum vibrating in my sinuses and my chest simultaneously. When that resonance is established, the voice has a warm, rich quality that projects without force.
Humming also reveals tension. If there is tightness in my jaw, my throat, or my neck, the hum will feel constricted. This is useful diagnostic information. I can then stretch or massage the tight area before proceeding.
Step Three: Lip Trills (One Minute)
Lip trills — blowing air through loosely closed lips to create a buzzing, motorboat-like sound — look ridiculous and are indispensable. They do three things simultaneously: they warm up the lips, they regulate airflow, and they release tension in the face.
I do lip trills on a single pitch, then slide up and down through my range. The key is to keep the lips loose. If they tighten, the trill stops. This forces relaxation, which is exactly what the face needs before performing.
I also do lip trills on specific phrases from my performance. Taking my opening line and delivering it as a lip trill — same rhythm, same inflection, just with the lips buzzing instead of forming words — is oddly effective at loosening up the delivery. When I then speak the line normally, it flows more easily because the muscles have already rehearsed the pattern.
Step Four: Articulation Drills (Two Minutes)
This is where the warm-up starts getting specific. Articulation drills wake up the tongue, lips, jaw, and soft palate — the articulators that shape vowels and consonants into intelligible speech.
I use tongue twisters. Not creative or funny ones. Functional ones, chosen to target specific articulators.
For the tongue: “Red leather, yellow leather” repeated at increasing speed. “Unique New York, unique New York” repeated until it is clean. “The tip of the tongue, the teeth, and the lips” repeated with exaggerated precision.
For the lips: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” at full speed with every P crisp and distinct.
For the jaw: Opening the mouth wide on every vowel, exaggerating the jaw movement to the point of absurdity. “How now brown cow” with the jaw dropping as far as it will go on every syllable.
I do each of these five to ten times, starting slow and building speed. The goal is crisp, clean articulation at performance pace.
Step Five: Range and Projection (Two Minutes)
The final step is calibrating range and projection for the specific venue. I deliver a few lines from my performance at different volumes: whisper, conversational, half projection, full projection. I speak to the back wall of the room, imagining an audience member sitting there, and I make sure my voice reaches them without straining.
If the venue is small, I calibrate down. If it is large, I calibrate up. The warm-up is not just about getting the voice ready. It is about tuning the voice to the space.
The Hotel Room Routine
Most of this routine happens in hotel rooms. I travel constantly for consulting work, and when I have a performance the next day, the hotel room becomes my preparation space.
The beauty of this warm-up is that it is quiet enough to do in a hotel without disturbing anyone. The breathing is silent. The humming is soft. The lip trills and articulation drills can be done at low volume. Only the projection step requires any real volume, and I usually save that for the venue itself during setup or sound check.
I have done this routine in hotels in Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, and more cities than I can count. It has become as automatic as brushing my teeth, and about as glamorous.
What Changed
The change was immediate and dramatic. The first performance where I did a proper warm-up before walking on stage, I noticed the difference from the opening line. My voice was already where it needed to be. The warmth, the resonance, the flexibility — they were all present from the first syllable instead of arriving five minutes into the show.
The flat first few minutes disappeared. Not because I had solved some deep performance problem, but because I had solved a physical one. My instrument was prepared.
Over time, the warm-up also improved my overall vocal quality. The daily practice of breathing, humming, and articulating made my voice more flexible as a general matter. I could access a wider range of sounds with less effort. The whisper-to-projection dynamic range that I now use deliberately in performance became possible because the warm-up routine had trained those muscles to respond quickly to what I wanted them to do.
The Resistance to Warming Up
I want to address something honestly. For a long time, I resisted the idea of vocal warm-ups because they felt theatrical. They felt like something actors do. I was not an actor. I was a consultant who performed magic on the side. Lip trills and tongue twisters felt like cosplay — like pretending to be a performer rather than actually being one.
This resistance was, in retrospect, the same resistance I felt about scripting, about rehearsing, about treating my performance as something that deserved serious preparation. It was the amateur’s delusion that natural talent should be enough, that preparation is a crutch, that real performers just walk out and do it.
Real performers walk out and do it because they have already done the work that nobody sees. The warm-up. The rehearsal. The physical preparation. The mental preparation. The work before the work.
The seven to ten minutes I spend warming up my voice are the least glamorous minutes of any performance day. They happen in bathrooms and hallways and hotel rooms. Nobody sees them. Nobody applauds them. But they are the reason my first line sounds the same as my last line — grounded, warm, and alive.
I wish someone had told me about this earlier. I spent a year fighting a problem that had a ten-minute solution. The voice is an instrument. It needs to be warmed up before it can perform. Everything else — the scripting, the delivery technique, the dynamic range, the emotional expression — all of it is built on the foundation of an instrument that is physically ready to work.
Warm up the instrument. Then play.