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Learning how to breathe properly is a very important factor in learning how to sing better.
Some people put great emphasis on breath support. Other people put little emphasis on breath support. I just want to put breath support in its proper place.
If learning how to breathe properly was all we needed in order to learn how to sing better, singing would be so much easier. But oh, things aren’t always that simple..and such is the case with singing.
For starters, I want to assert that you need to learn breath support. Period. There is no way of getting around this. You need air to create sound (phonate). Therefore, it would seem logical that you would need to learn how to regulate your air support when creating your sound, right? Right!
I want to go ahead and assert that I am coming at the subject of how to breathe properly from the stance of vocal cord closure. Without proper vocal cord closure, breath support will not help you one bit….ok, well maybe it will help you burst and shout through your high notes, but your vocal cords will not last very long and your tone won’t be clear. Breath support is most appropriately exercised when coming from a position of vocal cord closure.
Let’s further unpack this idea of learning how to breathe properly by examining what is actually going on regarding vocal cord closure and breath support. The vocal cords are positioned horizontally across your larynx. To get this image in your head, hold your hand out and make the peace sign. Now I want you to open and close the peace sign. This is a representation of how your vocal cords function. When the peace sign is open, that is like the resting state of the vocal cords (vocal abduction). When the peace sign is closed, that is like the singing state of the vocal cords (vocal adduction). Now, here is where we get into the healthy tension between vocal cord closure and breath support. You see, if you have proper vocal cord closure but lack breath support, your singing voice will find itself getting stuck in the back of your throat, giving you a kind of Kermit the Frog type of sound. On the flip side, if you have proper breath support but lack vocal cord closure, your singing voice will find itself sounding, well, breathy while being pushed and devoid of tone, causing excess strain on your vocal cords (and your audience’s ears).
Here’s the important factor in all of this: breath support adds that needed pressure to vocal cord closure in order to create a healthy tension within your voice.
Now that you have this, I want to give you some advice regarding breath support.
How To Breathe Properly Tip #1: Practice your breathing exercises regularly!
Your lungs need to be worked out just as much as your vocal cords do. Practice breathing from your diaphragm in order to augment the amount of breath you can take in with a single breath. Breathing from your diaphragm requires your stomach to poke out, not your chest! Take time to practice holding out your breath and work on increasing the length on time you can sing on a single breath.
How To Breathe Properly Tip #2: Practice breathing through your high notes!
As singers, we have a tendency to forget that we still need to breathe properly through our high notes. While we do not need as much breath on our high notes as we do for our lower notes, we still need to breathe through the high notes. If we forget to breathe through the high notes, our tone ends up sounding strained (this sound is different from the sound tension produces) and gets stuck in the back of our mouth. In this sense, we want to bring our sound forward (hey, doesn’t this sound familiar to classical teaching styles? – now you know what they mean!) by remembering to breathe properly through our high notes.
Obviously this list is not an exhaustive list, but it does highlight some of the main struggles that singers have regarding breath support. In my own personal experience and study, I find that most beginner singers struggle with this because they don’t know how to breathe properly and more advanced singers struggle with this because they forget that they still need to breathe properly.
Enacting proper breath support along with vocal cord closure will give you exceptional control over your voice. I think you will find the results pretty amazing when you get the two to flow hand in hand!
What are your own experiences with breath support? I’d love to hear from you!
As always, sing on my friends!
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I still don’t understand how that will help me find my breathing muscle… :/ I’ve been struggling with this ever since middle school. I was in band but they never taught me how to breathe properly and I joined choir my last year in school but they never taught me anything on breath support. I would really love for you to help me on how to breath properly.