I recently had a conversation with an old and trusted coach and conductor who has vast knowledge of singing and has worked with many illustrious singers in his career. He said, “I have come to the conclusion that lip trills are pretty useless.” I understand why he said this. In my own travels through the world of vocal instruction, I have been given this exercise mainly as a warm up, but on a couple of occasions, also as a therapeutic device. It is quite useful in both of these capacities. But, as with any exercise, if bad form is allowed and proper correction not implemented, it can be as useless as learning to sing underwater (although if someone develops an efficient way to do this, please do show me!).

The lip trill :  demonstrated below

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9o6VZhwi0U&w=560&h=315]

The lip trill is one of many good ways to warm up the voice while not demanding vowel formation or consonants. (Other ways include tongue trills, hums, exercises on semi-occluded consonants such as V, Z, Ng, N, others as well.) For this post we’ll stick to the lip trill. What lip trilling is good for is that it gets the air moving past the vocal folds in a way that should help the cords function efficiently, keeping the air from being pressurized and keeping the lips, jaw and facial muscles in a neutral position so that there is minimal strain and the student/singer can warm up the voice with less chance of vocal harm. As a tool, it can be used to help the student feel where air pressure and proper phonation occur. It’s not very useful for helping to understand vowel formation or resonance. It is perhaps because of this limitation that my conductor friend finds them not terribly useful. And for his purposes, I’d agree, they probably don’t help very much if he’s working on a piece of music with a singer.

However, sometimes, as a therapeutic device, lip trills can be used if, let’s say, you’re singing a phrase and it feels tight or you feel the pitch is off. If you stop and sing the phrase only on a lip trill, you may feel where you’re over- or under- utilizing air and/or pressure and then be able to go back and correct accordingly. You might also discover you’re adding pressure in your face or neck or lips by going back and forth from the lip trill to the music with or without text.

So, I’m here to say that, used for it’s intended purpose, especially as a warm up, I do feel that lip trills can be quite helpful as one of many tools in a singer’s toolkit. But there are MANY others that can serve this purpose and I will get to them as well. For now, check out the video where I go into a little more detail about this exercise. Trill happy!