The first thing to remember when doing warm up vocal exercises, make sure that you know what the purpose of the exercise is. Each warm up vocal exercise should have a specific purpose in mind. It serves no purpose if the exercise is done wrong, and you have the potential of harming your vocal chords.

The most common exercise and the simplest to do is humming. This does not require the use of a piano so it can be done at any time. In any exercise that you do there are a few things to remember:

1. Make sure that at all time the voice is properly supported.

2. Start at the lower middle part of your voice.

3. Make sure that the throat is completely relaxed and that the jaw is in a natural position. In other words make sure that you are not clenching your teeth.

You can do this exercise by gently humming up and down the scale of your middle voice making sure that no pressure is put on the vocal chords. Remember that even when humming it still requires that same amount of support as when you are singing at soft volume.

Even more important than the humming, make sure that your support is correct. The voice is supported by means breath. If you do not breathe properly you cannot sing properly. The humming exercise can be carried on for a period of ten minutes.

The second exercise that can be used after the initial humming exercise is to use the Italian vowel "u" again starting on the lower middle part of the voice. This can be used in the following ways:

1. Using the vowel "u" sing from the tonic to the dominant three times. At the end of each set of three move up a semitone on the scale until the top register of the voice is reached.

2. Next do major arpeggios starting at the tonic and returning to the tonic. The point of doing the arpeggios is that there has to be seamless integration of the voice from the bottom of the voice to the top of the voice. This can only be done slowly so that it is possible to hear if there are any changes in timbre that has to be corrected as you go along.

3. Next do octave jump, and then come down in the major arpeggio. Make sure that your support is enough to sustain the octave for three beats and then coming down the major arpeggio.

The purpose of starting off the warm up vocal exercise with the "u" vowel is to make sure that the vocal chords stretches gently as you go through the entire range of the voice. It is very important to make sure that your support is correct.

If not, you will put strain on your vocal chords and it will get tired much quicker as opposed to when the exercise is done correctly.

The purpose of warm up vocal exercises is to make sure that your voice is warmed up gradually. It is not something that can be rushed! All of the above exercises can then be applied to the rest of the Italian form vowels.