CASA - The Contemporary A Capella Society

Breathing is the central core of singing. And breathing is also an act that is to a great extent voluntary.  Very few people, especially in a stressful society such as ours, breathe completely – that is, really take deep full breaths – as a matter of habit.  We routinely control and constrict our breathing, and it’s a fact that we bring our daily habits to singing.  

Ironically, with a lot of people who are athletic, although they routinely breathe more and better than most of us, their minds and emotions can shut down their superior breathing when they have to stand up to sing in front of an audience. That’s why people go to bars for karaoke, and is there anyone, anywhere who has ever done karaoke sober?

Geez. This is already boring. Trying to describe real breathing for singing in writing is either extremely clinical and useless, or conceptual and useless. Probably because it presents as a paradox. How does one take a full, deep breath and stay completely relaxed?

My dad tried to explain breathing to me. Breathing for a wind instrument is a lot like breathing for singing. His attempts at illuminating the mysteries of breathing completely confused me, so it took me forever to figure it out. He understood it perfectly well, evidently. He could play the tenor saxophone louder than anything I ever heard, and play beautiful, contoured phrases that went on forever, and you can’t do either one of those things if you don’t know how to breathe.

He would talk about my ‘breadbasket’, an abstraction that befuddled me, and my diaphragm, whatever that was, and how my stomach was supposed to move in and out when I breathed. The stomach thing confused me the most, plus it looked funny. I didn’t understand it and I couldn’t do it. He explained it to me over and over, showing me the proper way to take a breath, gasping like someone had just poured ice water down his back, or by miming a drowning man coming up for air, neither of which were particularly good teaching examples, since they are driven, in the one case, by shock and tension, and in the other, by despair. With each iteration I became more puzzled, and he became more theatrical and impatient, which in turn made me even tenser and less able to breathe. When I had become as tense as a mink with an electrode up its hiney, he’d poke me in the belly and yell ‘breathe!’ which terrified me. Breathing lessons were generally over when he rose in a disgusted huff and left the room for a smoke.  

Each round of futile explanation deepened my gloom and further irritated my dad. He could also throw a baseball real far, but he couldn’t seem to teach me how to do that either. I kept worrying that the bread in my breadbasket wasn’t soft enough, or I wasn’t pushing my stomach in and out, or if I was, I was doing it wrong, and I had a hard enough time remembering to do it at all but it made my dad happy when I did. And for all my mystified struggling, I made a miserable, thin little honking noise on the tenor sax, which was nearly as tall as I was.

Years of struggling with the French horn got me on track, but it was not until I started singing that I got it. Breathing for singing is what it is.  Once again, there’s a paradox; it’s hard to sing if you don’t breathe right, and you can’t learn to breathe right if you don’t try to sing. And until you do breathe correctly, you can’t experience the full potential of your voice.  Having a mad hot set of pipes helps, but they won’t work correctly without the breath behind them.

Trying to explain proper breathing, with charts and illustrations, is like asking someone to imagine what food in a restaurant might taste like from reading the menu. Trying to do it through guided imagery is, in my book, irresponsible hocus pocus. It’s an experiential discovery, and no long-winded exposition is going to either enlighten or entertain anyone. What I can do, though, is to talk a little about becoming aware of your breathing, and how you can keep breathing in crunch situations, like performing. While not particularly entertaining, it might be helpful.  

If you have never paid much attention to your breathing, you can start any time. How are you breathing right at this moment?  Do you breath shallowly or deeply? Rapidly or slowly? What happens to your breathing when you’re anxious or scared?  Do you find that you hold your breath in tense situations? Just starting to notice your breathing patterns is the seed of awareness you need to begin breathing fully.

Most people have habitual tensions associated with breathing, and those tensions are so deeply ingrained that they are taken for granted and accepted as a normal part of the process. In reality, those tensions interfere with breathing, and often with a singer’s vocal physiology as well. Do your shoulders work up and down when you breathe? Do they often end up around your ears? Do you find yourself fighting for air during performances? Does your voice get shaky or wispy or raw? Do you have a hard time holding notes or finishing phrases? Those are all signs of unwanted tension in your breathing process.

There is also the common tendency amongst us humans to try to control emotions by limiting the amplitude of one’s breathing. For many people, the experience of really breathing entails the experience of really feeling, and that can be a deeply unsettling experience. Really breathing can activate all kinds of deep inner stuff. So if you’re uncomfortable with feeling, maybe you shouldn’t breathe.  

If you’re the brave and adventurous sort, however, there are a few things you can do to help your breathing in performance. The first is to start doing deep, rhythmic breathing about a half-hour before you have to go onstage. Runners do this before races, so that they don’t ‘lock up’ when the starting gun goes off. It’s also a great way to calm down and get rid of pre-performance jitters.  

Another thing you can do is juggle before a performance. Yeah, juggle, as in three little beanbags. It’s easy to learn how, and I’m not sure why it works, but it seems to balance and occupy both sides of the brain, and maybe it distracts and absorbs you so that some of the tension just goes away by itself, which makes it easier to breathe. This is practically a for-sure thing. I’ve never seen it fail.  

Then there’s martial arts. Tai chi is my personal fave. After years of practice, I can tear anyone apart in slow motion. But one of the real benefits of the practice is that it reverses the body’s natural response to stressful situations. Instead of constricting the breath, the discipline of tai chi causes one to relax, let go of tension and dig deeper into the body, which is exactly what a singer needs.  

In many ways, breathing is the Grail of singing. Get it, and you have conquered a huge chunk of vocal technique. If you don’t feel like doing deep breathing, or juggling, or tai chi, there are still many exercises you can do to re-pattern your breathing, but they are just too bloody boring to enumerate in a column that bills itself as infotainment.