Ep 7 Live Q&A – April 4, 2019 – How do I evenly distribute my breath while singing?

Mike: So question seven and today, we’re going a little bit longer ’cause last week, we were off-air, so seven, question seven, how do I evenly distribute my breath when I sing? I can get winded easily and it affects the rest of the song.

Matt: Yeah. So this to me sounds like a combination of things we’ve been talking about. So first of all, make sure that you are expanding when you begin to sing and then find a place that your air wants to expand most. You want to pay attention that you don’t collapse. A lot of people get, like actually, I was teaching in Portland last week, which is why I couldn’t be here, one of the teachers there talked to me about describing it as the accordion effect, that you breathe in and expand and then they push the accordion in too fast. Then the accordion effect is pulling in your abs, it’s pulling in your rib cage and if you do that too quickly, it’s going to force all the air up against your larynx and it’s going to make you feel like you have either an uneven stream of breath or you’re using your breath too quickly and don’t have enough [inaudible 00:50:53] phrase.

Matt: So one of the easiest things you can do is to put your hands on your bottom of your ribs right here and then as you breathe in, try to make sure that the rib cage stays out and that these abdominal muscles aren’t contracting. If it’s not working [inaudible 00:51:07]you see this, (singing), and all of a sudden, they squeeze in. Instead, we want to see, (singing), and everything should stay out while you’re singing and it should only come in naturally, right.

Mike: Right, we want to resist that.

Matt: Yeah, resist the collapse because it’s not even natural collapse at that moment. It’s your abdominal muscles trying to grab down and pull and force air out of your lungs. We don’t want them forcing air out of your lungs. We want your lungs to take care of themselves and then, if you need a little bit of help, contract the abdominal wall. We don’t want the abdominal wall to take over. It will, right. A vital part of its function is to contract to help us stand upright, to help hold that viscera [inaudible 00:51:47] in. So it’s going to try once it feels that expansion, it’s going to try to contract on you. Don’t let it. You have to resist that.

Matt: The other thing is to look at the phrase weighting of the phrase that you’re singing and think of it in terms of a musical phrase. Where is the emphasis in the line, right? Phrase weighting is choosing which word you put the emphasis on. So I could “Hey, let’s go eat, Grandma” or I could say “Hey, let’s go eat, Grandma,” right? Two very different meanings to the exact same sentence.

Mike: Hey, let’s go eat Grandma.

Matt: Yeah, very different meaning as well, right. And so not only does it matter when it comes in terms of communicating the meaning of the sentence, but it also can make a big difference in breath control. If you are heavily weighting the beginning of phrases, you’re going to have a hard time having anything left at the end, right. If you know that there is some heavy weighting towards the end of the phrase and you take a small breath, you’re not going to have enough air to sing that phrase.

Matt: So it’s really about kind of taking the sentence and go through it word by word. So if we said “Well, I’m running down the road,” we’re going to do “Well, I’m running down the road. Well, I’m running down the road. Well, I’m running down the road. Well, I’m running down the road. Well, I’m running down the road. Well, I’m running down the road.” And you’re going to start to figure out which words make sense. To me, it was running. (Singing) Right. Those two might be it. So then I need to breathe and sing to those weighted parts of that phrase. (Singing) So then you’d move in and out of it and let it be a living sound, okay.

Matt: The other thing that I notice people do is when they get on to vowels, sometimes they lock their breath. So they’ll go, (singing), and they’ll just hold on to that E vowel and just grind away on it, and that creates compression that makes you feel like you’re running out of breath. You have to let those vowels be living vowels, right. You don’t want it to be a stagnant vowel. You want it to be able to move. (Singing) So then it’s always moving. It’s always flowing. It’s never stuck.

Mike: Yeah, that’s great. Good points. I like the emphasis and, again, singing is a process of telling a story through your voice, right, emotion, sound, pitch, and communicating, using the breath to let that flow out. So I think thinking stylistically and how you’re going to interpret what you’re saying, what you’re singing about a huge way to shift it from being a problem about the air or the breath to hey, what’s the mode, what am I actually trying to communicate or tell, right?

Mike: So I would say for me, if you’re getting winded easily, I’m just going to go back to registration, registration first, right? So if that’s coming up, I would say you want to try a couple things. Some of the things I tend to do checking with singers that have that is I like to have them yodel, right, back and forth so do your chest voice, do your falsetto and see how easily can you let go and how easy can you come back. Can you go,(singing)? What does that do, right? That’s going to cause some of your registration to be in the chest, right, let go, go to the falsetto, come back, right.

Mike: If you can’t even exercise the two separately, right, then you probably going to have a mixed registration or one of your registers is dominating the other register, and if you have something going on with your registration, you’re probably going to have some issue with the air escaping, being too winded, not being able to sing to the end of the phrase, having to take additional breaths where they don’t belong in the middle of a phrase, or changing the punctuation and the composer didn’t put a comma after the. I’m just saying, right. It doesn’t belong there. So why are you taking it, right?

Mike: If that’s the case and you’re working on that, then you probably want to go work on some technical work before you go back to that song or turn that phrase in your song into your exercise, right. That’s a way that we used to do it. We would just work on one phrase at a time and turn it into an exercise and it might take you four weeks to develop through it. So I would say connect with us if you have a question about why you’re getting winded. We’ve got a number of teachers. They’re signing up, too. But this isn’t about that. This is about helping everyone out there. If you do have something with your breath, you want to explore what’s going on with your registration I would say.

Matt: Absolutely.