A lip bubble looks a bit like blowing a raspberry. But you also make a sound under it, and generally, we have our fingers in our cheeks to lift the weight of our cheeks off of our vibrating lips. Here’s a short video I put together explaining:
a) what lip bubbles are;
b) how to do them; and
c) alternatives if you’re finding them a bit tricky.
In all seriousness, the reason it’s a top favourite among voice coaches the world over is because it is extremely effective.
Of all the tools in my arsenal, if I could only ever use ONE of them forever and ever, I would pick the lip bubble.
How does it work?
As explained in the video above, it is what we call a ‘semi-occluded’ exercise. What this means, is that we are partially blocking the flow of air. This acts like a secondary valve after your vocal cords. Your vocal cords are a first ‘valve’ for regulating air, and your lips form a second ‘valve’. They restrict but do not stop the flow of air. It’s not a painful restriction either (at least not when done right), we are just trying to impede/slow the flow of air.
This creates a column of pressured air between your lips and your larynx, i.e. less air is being permitted to escape the lips than is being pushed towards it, therefore there is a build-up of pressurised air behind the lips, and therefore we end up with a column of pressurised air between the lips and the vocal cords.
This causes the column of pressurised air to act downwards on the vocal cords and larynx, helping to keep the larynx a little more stable during operation. By repeatedly doing exercises with the lip bubble, and exposing the singer and the singer’s body to such laryngeal stability, this promotes stability in the muscle memory of the student. It also helps to warm-up the vocal cords and stimulate blood flow to the vocal cords in a low-impact manner. I’ve even heard some teachers liken this to a form of vocal massage, as the column of pressurised air almost massages the vocal cords during their vibration. This certainly seems to make sense to me, and Ingo Titze’s videos on the use of the straw to massage and flatten out the vocal cords certainly seems to corroborate such a statement.
Where do we use it?
We use it during a warmup, a cool-down, and often as a connective exercise in lessons, e.g. to help connect a student from one part of their voice to another, keeping additional stability, and keeping the voice operating well but in a lower-impact manner than perhaps they were doing before. In short, we use it EVERYWHERE!
Why I like it?
Other than the already mentioned functional benefits to the lip bubble, there is a key psychological reason I really like the lip bubble.
Often, when it comes to singing, students concentrate so much on ‘what happens if I fail?!?!’ that they actually DO fail… because they are so distracted and wound up about ‘being right’, that they can’t do ANYTHING differently to what they were doing before. This is a shame, but 100% just the result of being a flawed human being. We’re all the same!
HOWEVER! The lip bubble, by its very nature of being an odd exercise, removes them from their normal hearing of their voice, and so they stop TRYING to do certain things, because they have no idea what they SHOULD be doing. As such, this allows us as voice teachers to introduce the singer to a different way of utilising their vocal cords. We as trained voice teachers can also hear the singer’s instrument (to some extent) underneath the lip bubble, which helps guide us towards the exercises that can promote stability and that is balanced to their particular instrument, whereas with excess manipulation by some students/singers, it’s sometimes hard to cut through the layers of over-styling/manipulation.
In short, I find that by giving them an exercise that is relatively easy to do, albeit bizarre, but that is totally unfamiliar, we bypass the singers natural tendency to want to overly control what is going on… and just let the process happen.
This is IMMENSELY useful in the process of vocal development, as it gives the student a new experience without having to be consciously made to do it (HINT: This is KEY to effective voice teaching, AND to long lasting vocal habits).
It can also be done in a relatively low-impact fashion, perfect for beginning students. It can be done with more intensity, over a wider range, and with more complexity, perfect for intermediate students. It can also be lengthened and altered or used with other exercises for more advanced students. It is what I would refer to as a ‘lenticular‘ exercise – something that is useable with every level of students, and every way is generally right, but that it can be used to greater effect in more complex and varied ways the more advanced a student becomes.
So not only can we use it as a warm-up, or a cool-down, or as a connective exercise, or a developmental exercise, but all of these, and everything in between.
The lip bubble is vastly underused by many singers, so get going with it.
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