Tonal Tuesday - Lip Trills to Extend Your Range

New to our ETS Blog?  Every Tuesday,  we present a topic about being in or directing a choir. Stop by every Tuesday for your weekly dose of ideas for keeping the Song, Service and Fun in choral work. Browse through our past posts or use the Google Search function on the top left of our blog to search for something specific.  Sign up to get an e-mail alert of each post at the top right of the blog.  Glad to have you with us. 

Last week, our post talked about warming up the voice before singing.  This week Lisa Popeil has an exercise to help you find or define your upper and lower ranges.  She uses an "aw" sound that has, in my view, a bit of a twang.  Listen and notice that her sound has more of a throat sound.  My suggestion would be to drop the jaw a bit more and make the sound more as you would when you see a cute baby - "ah".
Then, for the upper range, Lisa pulls out the lip trills or "bubbling" discussed last week.  This does work better I think.  Is there any reason you couldn't use the lip trills for the lower sounds?  Try it and see what you think.