Shittyish Singing Practice Routine

More disorganized music-related stuff. Keeping to posting every day as a practice for a while.

I am really not a singer, but do backing vocals for my band so I want to get better at singing. Here is what I do (it is by no means a professional, or even well-designed routine but it works for me):

Warm up singing notes up and down my range (happens to go from a bit lower than the guitar's open fat E string to about the A above middle C (fret 5 on thinnest string). I want to work on accuracy and vibrato so I will do this 3 times with a 60 bpm metronome (1 click per second), firstly with 2 vibrato waves per tap, then 3, then 4. All of this while playing the notes on a guitar. Apparently vibrato usually is 5-7 waves per second so I'm working up to that. As an aside, I usually go up and down with a different diminished arpeggio each time because the notes are evenly spaced. 

A simple exercise to get how to do vibrato initially is to pretend you are starting a faulty car, so it sort of goes:
RRRrrrrrrRRRRrrrrrrRRRR etc. 
You should try not to use your mouth or diaphragm but rather your vocal cords to achieve vibrato. 

Sometimes I will use a tuner to show me how far I'm deviating from the desired note, the visual feedback helps with staying accurate.

I'll then sing a few songs along with the guitar, sometimes recording myself on my phone to get feedback, which was initially very painful to listen to.

Here are the songs I sing most in case someone is interested:

• Simon and Garfunkel - Wednesday Morning 3am. The higher harmony in the key of C, then D then the lower one in the key of F.
• Turin Brakes - Feeling Oblivion. Key of F (original key is too high for me).
• Johnny Cash: Hurt
• Johnny Cash: Ring of Fire
• Alice in Chains: Nutshell
• John Mayer: Stop this Train

That's it. I usually will do about 3/4 of what's above, or sometimes a bit more, about 5 days per week as well as singing during rehearsals and of course in the shower. I have noticed some good improvement over the ~4 months that I've done it. 

One drawback is I sing pretty quietly because I'm somewhat self-conscious about it, but as my control improves the self-consciousness lessens. 

Finally, I am conscious about posture and possible injury (for example resting if I feel tiredness in the vocal cords). This should always be researched I believe. I am not too worried about a more extensive routine generally because I'm somewhat happy where I'm at and happy to progress slowly over the course of months/years.