Tag: advanced breathing

Back Breathing: A Tutorial

This is the final article in the series about breath. The other two articles are here and here. This is a very advanced breathing technique. It creates the most amount of resonance possible in the body, therefore making your sound better. It also increases the amount of air available to you.

How Do You Back Breathe?

Fill up your lungs to about 80% full. When you breathe out, keep your rib cage expanded. This will create a reserve of air that you try not to use. Try to keep your stomach muscles as relaxed as possible.

You know you’re doing it right when you bend over and feel your lower back expanding and contracting with your breath.

While exhaling, if you need to use the reserve air because it’s a particularly long passage, feel free to use it. Try not to use the reserve for every breath.

What If I Can’t Get It?

I learned this technique through reading a book. It said, “If you don’t understand how to do it from my description, talk to a singer.” That’s a common phrase when you read flute literature.

When I talked to a singer, she said to imagine the bottom half of your rib cage as a barrel that you’re holding around your midsection. It’s as full as you can get it and you shouldn’t let the barrel collapse.

An Odd Way to Practice Back Breathing

This breathing technique is hard until you get the hang of it. I practiced it while I was driving, doing tone work, etc, but I was holding too much tension in my shoulders and my stomach.

Enter marathon training. I tried breathing in this way while I was running and it worked! I was able to keep everything relaxed (because a 10-mile training run is exhausting) and my pace increased by a minute per mile! This was because I was using so much more air.

I was able to incorporate this kind of breathing into my flute practice within a week after my breakthrough while running.

How Should I Use Back Breathing?

You need to master the first two breathing methods first. After that, this should be your primary way of breathing while playing the flute. You can incorporate J breathing into back breathing if you wish – meaning, do both at the same time.

This form of breathing gives your sound more resonance because you’re allowing enough space for the organs in your rib cage to have a deeper vibration than normal.

Another plus is it helps you play longer without taking a breath.

Conclusion

Please don’t attempt this form of breathing until you’re fluent in belly breathing and J breathing. I didn’t learn it until after college, myself, but I could conceivably see someone learning it towards the end of high school at the earliest.

This form of breathing is very advanced, so don’t be upset if you don’t get it right away. It took me a whole year to figure it out.

When you do figure out how to back breathe, your sound will be better and you’ll be able to play longer between breaths. What’s not to love about that?

The First Advanced Breathing Technique

In my last post, I talked about Belly Breathing, which is the first kind of breathing that you learn. This article is about the first kind of advanced breathing technique that you learn, sometimes called J breathing. You usually learn this technique in high school.

J breathing used to be considered a different school of thought than belly breathing. Now they are both used because they each have their own purpose.

What is J Breathing’s Purpose?

This advanced breathing technique is for when you don’t need to use much air and you want to increase your resonance (I’ll talk about resonance a little later). It also helps with accented, short notes.

How Do I Do J Breathing?

Remember how I talked about pulling your belly muscles in for the exhale during the last article? With J breathing, you only pull in the top half of your muscles, leaving your lower abs relaxed. You’re making an imaginary J with your abs. You breathe in as if you were belly breathing.

Sometimes your abs make a gentle movement. This would be for short phrases where you don’t need much air, so you make it sound as good as possible.

Sometimes your abs make a sharp, quick movement. This would be for things like sforzando, accents, or marcato. The quick movement of the abs is putting quick pressure on your lungs, making an explosion of air, which helps with your quick volume changes.

What is resonance?

I’m about to get really technical, here. If you don’t want to know the science behind resonance, just know that it increases the overtones and the undertones of the tone that is played, making it sound better.

We all learned (or will learn) about resonance in physics class. Every item vibrates at a different frequency, on an elemental level. When a tone is made near an item, it can cause the vibration of that item to deepen, making the same tone that was made.

This is why the proverbial opera singer can make a glass shatter with her voice. If you want to learn more about resonance, this would be a good place to start.

Why Does J Breathing Increase Resonance?

Your whole body resonates with the sounds you’re making on your instrument. The more relaxed your body is, the more it resonates. By leaving the bottom half of your abs loose, you’re increasing the amount of resonance your body can do.

What Other Purpose Does J Breathing Have?

Sometimes when we do short phrases, we automatically breathe in between the phrases, even when we don’t have to. If there are too many short phrases in a row, it starts to feel like we’re hyperventilating. We get dizzy, light-headed, and tired.

J-breathing automatically decreases the amount of breath that you pull in and use. You aren’t using your lower abs, so the visceral mass (intestines, etc) that is behind the lower abs aren’t being used to put pressure on the diaphragm. That causes the lungs to not empty as much as with belly breathing, therefore using less air.

Conclusion

We only learn J breathing after we master belly breathing. It’s designed to be learned after we have learned to maximize our lung capacity. That’s what makes it an advanced breathing technique.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sore abs just from reading this! This technique takes awhile to master, so don’t be upset if it takes a month or two to get it down.

Next week will be the final article in this series. There’s one more advanced breathing technique, and it’s the best (and hardest) one!