Membership Expired Kat Hunter
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Eliza- Rad! That’s good to know about it being more about recoil. Gives me something to research and ponder to see if it can help my teaching :).
And what you said 100% – it’s totally about balance!! This is a reason I spend so little time on breathing. Because often you can address the balance by changing things on the throat level first, and that’s just so effective (and the breathing gets better as a bi-product!). Using tools like vowel, pitch and volume to affect the intrinsic muscles of the larynx is really helpful for most in addressing that balance. Woohoo!
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@Wes, I agree that deep breathing gives people confidence. On the rare occasion I do address someone’s breath, it’s often to get them into the mental state of being confident and prepared. Although I note that often when this takes place, a change has also occurred in the students’ posture. I believe that posture and breathing style are so intertwined that sometimes if you address one, the other just comes along with it. And a nice “nobel” posture, as it’s often called, also works wonders for the psyche.
@Eliza, it’s interesting that you feel like focusing on deep breathing helps to stop over-exertion. Do you feel that this is partly psychological as well as physical, as mentioned above?
I’d like to add a caveat as well, that whatever breath you push through the throat from the lungs has to be accommodated by a corrosponding strength in the throat to resist that air pressure, or else you won’t end up with more “support”. Try filling up your lungs with the perfect deep breath and then sighing it out. Not very supported right? But if you do the same on a nice loud ahh in a strong chest voice it feels the exact opposite! Super supported! I’d like to quietly suggest that the idea of support is not purely breathing dependent but in fact comes from the air, source and filter all working in tandem (or the lungs, vocal folds and vocal tract/vowel). If you give a singer who is already too breathy a breathing exercise, feeling as though she just needs more support, you may in fact be encouraging her to compress and expel MORE air, which will then overload the already weak adductor muscles of the throat.
I guess my point is that breathing is important as a psychological device, as a posture-rectifier and often there-by as an auxiliary way of keeping the larynx stable, but the idea that “support comes from the diaphragm” is often too simplistic a model.
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So you’re saying it’s a lot to do with awareness right? Just being aware of what the body does naturally to control and accommodate air. Because I 100% agree with you that it should be the same breathing as speaking. Natural, automatic etc.
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We’ve talked about this on the facebook so I decided it was time to make it happen. These are some things I’d be interested to hear about from you guys, but feel free to wax lyrical and tangentialise where necessary :).
1. Do you choose to teach breathing yes/no? Do you teach it for all students or only some?
2. If/when you do teach breathing, what are your aims? And what is the perceived result in the student when these aims are achieved (physically, sonically, psychologically etc.)?
3. How much time do you typically spend on breathing (per lesson or per student)? Do you see it as a pillar of technique that must be worked at repeatedly, or is it more “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?
Go!
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I love the idea of doing stretches if the student has had a stressful day. This is something I’d love to do more.
I see you use the word engage a lot, like “engage with the diaphragm”. I haven’t seen this terminology before. Obviously we always use the diaphragm no matter how we breathe – we use it in our sleep! Could you explain what you mean by engage? Are you just talking about a low breath rather than a more “clavicular” one?
