About OOVO: Designed in Santa Monica, Worn by Grammy Winners

A vocal warm-up worth wearing

A working singer steps offstage, walks to the wings, and lifts a thin metal pendant from a chain around their neck. They hum into it for thirty seconds. Their range loosens. Their breath settles. They walk back on.

That pendant is an OOVO Straw, and the routine is older than recorded music: phonate through a narrow channel, and the voice resets. What's new is the object. A patented, jewelry-grade tool designed to do the work of a piece of clinical equipment without looking like one.

We make vocal training tools for people who use their voices for a living, and for the millions more who want to. The science is settled. The design, until recently, wasn't.

Why we built this

OOVO began with a problem its founder kept watching unfold in real time.

Patrick Lundquist spent his twenties on the road with jazz legend Al Jarreau, then ran national education programs for the GRAMMY organization, working with the country's most promising high-school vocalists. In greenrooms and rehearsal halls, the same scene repeated itself: a singer in distress, a stranger handing over a plastic coffee straw, an awkward warm-up performed over a paper cup.

The exercise (semi-occluded vocal tract phonation, or SOVT) is one of the most validated techniques in modern vocal pedagogy. The delivery system was a piece of disposable plastic.

The OOVO Straw is the answer to that mismatch. Same physics, same clinical endpoint, engineered to professional tolerances, finished like a piece of fine jewelry, and built to last a career. The Sing Ring, our second patented tool, applies the same thinking to a hand-held form factor preferred by many coaches and clinicians.

The founders

Patrick Lundquist, CEO. Patrick spent his twenties touring internationally with Al Jarreau as a vocalist and lyricist, and his thirties building music-education programs for the Recording Academy, where he worked with the country's top emerging high-school singers. He has lived inside the problem OOVO solves: vocal strain on the road, the fragility of a working instrument, the absence of a serious tool for daily upkeep. He leads product, science partnerships, and the artist community.

Amy Henson, CMO. Amy is a marketing executive who has spent her career on common-sense solutions to operational waste. At OOVO she sets the standard for everything that touches a customer outside the product itself: considered packaging, shipping, supplier accountability, and the long-term carbon math of a small premium brand.

What we believe

Vocal science first. Our products exist because the underlying research is robust. Decades of work, much of it published by Dr. Ingo Titze and built on by clinicians like Jeanie LoVetri, established the SOVT protocols our tools deliver. We design backward from that science. Trends are not a roadmap.

Be kind to the planet. We are not a sustainability brand. We are a vocal-tools brand that refuses to ship a product designed to last a career inside packaging designed for a landfill. Recyclable materials and no shortcuts at the supplier level are table stakes for us, not marketing.

Music education deserves real support. A meaningful share of our work goes to schools, conservatories, professional studios, and nonprofits. We offer reduced bulk pricing for music programs and partner with educators and clinicians who are putting these tools into the hands of students who would not otherwise have them.

The science, briefly

Semi-occluded vocal tract exercises work by creating gentle back-pressure at the lips, which lowers the phonation threshold pressure and balances the vocal folds during oscillation. The clinical and pedagogical literature (Titze, LoVetri, and a generation of voice scientists who built on their work) supports SOVT for warm-up, cool-down, range extension, breath efficiency, and the smoothing of register transitions. A fuller treatment of the research lives on our How It Works page.

Used by the people who use their voices for a living

OOVO is in the dressing rooms and practice rooms of Grammy-winning artists and Metropolitan Opera principals, in the warm-up routines of Pentatonix's Scott Hoying and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, on Broadway, and on the desks of voice clinicians and speech-language pathologists who recommend it to their patients and students.

Designed in Santa Monica

OOVO is designed in Santa Monica, California, and individually hand-crafted by skilled jewelers and metalworkers. We work in jewelry-grade materials (sterling silver, 18k gold vermeil, 18k rose gold vermeil, and antimicrobial brass) because a tool you wear every day should look and feel like one you'd want to. Both the OOVO Straw and the Sing Ring are protected by issued utility patents, and OOVO is a registered trademark.

For schools, studios, and clinics

If you teach voice, run a music program, or treat voices for a living, we make it easier to put OOVO into the hands of the people who need it. We offer reduced bulk pricing for schools, conservatories, professional vocal studios, and clinical practices, and we run a Pro and Ambassador program for working coaches and clinicians.

Apply for Pro pricing →