Ep 7 Live Q&A – April 4, 2019 – Should I breathe high or low?

Mike: Yeah. Good point. I think it’s fascinating to hear the background there and the historical socioeconomic impact as it applies to just singing and institutionalization of education of singing. It’s fascinating. I’d love to talk about that more, but let’s move on to our next question. The next question we have, question number six, where to breathe and how high or low? Now we’ve talked about this a little bit, but I think let’s explore kind of the location of where do we breathe. This comes from [Casey Singer 00:42:05].

Matt: There’s a book called National Schools of Singing. It’s by a guy named Richard Miller who’s a world-famous voice teacher. And he went throughout Europe trying to discover how the Germans taught breath control to their classical singers versus the Italian versus the English and the French, and what he found is there was no universal way.

Matt: Essentially, we expand wherever we relax muscles. If you have a loose core like I do right now and you breathe, it’s really easy for those abdominal muscles to release and I will expand lower, okay. If you have a really firm abdominal wall and you breathe, those muscles are already pretty tight and you’re going to have a hard time expanding low. So what tends to happen is that as your rib cage expands and that diaphragm hits resistance, all of a sudden, we start to see the rib cage move up and out. So those are kind of our two extremes, we either see somebody really breathe low or somebody starting to creep up high. Neither one is necessarily better than the other. I know that seems to be sacrilegious for singing voice teachers, but there’s research that backs this.

Matt: There’s a lady named Jennifer [Cowgill 00:43:14] and she looked at the way that people breathed based on their body types. She looked at people who were more naturally robust and found that if they were told just to breathe the way that they wanted to, they breathed a little bit lower. She found people who were more muscular and she found that when they breathe the way that they wanted to, they ended up expanding a little bit more laterally. Then she looked at people who were really thin, people who were like a size 0, size 2, a guy with a 26-, 28-inch waist and she found that they had the most lateral and vertical rib cage expansion.

Matt: She then did some respiratory measurements on them to see how much air they could expel from their lungs and how much air they expelled in the first second. Now, most people would expect that you’re going to get the best respiratory measurements off of a low belly breath and the worst respiratory measurements off of a higher breath, but that’s not what she found. What she found was it was statistically insignificant meaning there was zero difference in the amount of air you could expel and the amount of air contained in your lungs when you breathe for your body type, breathing lower if you had a robust body type or breathing more laterally if you had a more muscular or thin body type, okay. So let’s take that information and set it to the side.

Matt: In the classical singing world, people like a warmer tone. A lot of that comes from whether or not your larynx is higher or lower. Classical singers tend to favor a lower abdominal breath because when you breathe lower, it pulls your diaphragm down. It pulls your lungs down. It pulls your larynx down. If you’re a voice teacher, go look up tracheal pull, okay. So when you breathe lower, it pulls everything down which makes your voice a little bit warmer. That can be great, but if you’re trying to belt or sing rock and roll, you want really more of a floating larynx sound and yeah, you’re going to get some of that growl, when you breathe really low, all of a sudden, you’ve blocked your larynx so it can’t move. So in that case, a more lateral breathing position is going to allow you to have some laryngeal flexibility.

Matt: So we really have two components here. We can choose which muscles to relax and where they’re going to expand and that expansion is not necessarily going to be a determining factor in how much air you put into your lung and how much air you can expel out. And the way that you expand can affect your larynx, and a lower larynx might help a classical singer, but it might get in the way of a commercial singer. So the way that you should breathe best is the way that’s best for you, okay, the way that’s most comfortable for you. The one thing I think we can all agree with is we don’t want your clavicle heaving up and down. So this is your clavicle. You don’t want to see people going [inaudible 00:45:44] and breathing with their shoulders, okay. That’s bad. That’s not getting air into your lungs.

Mike: So we don’t want to see shoulders move when you’re breathing, right.

Matt: No. You don’t want to see that ’cause that’s using muscles that don’t need to be involved. But you might breathe in and feel that when you just relax and just breathe low in and out or you pant, you might see that when you pant, you do bounce a lot in the lower part of your body. And if that’s what feels good, then go with it. You might feel that your rib cage wants to expand more laterally, [inaudible 00:46:10] feels like it expands that way and if that’s what feels best to you, go with it for now. Sing for your [rep 00:46:17] and see which one feels better.

Matt: You can switch back and forth. So one time, try to sing the phrase and breathe really low into your stomach. Next time you breathe and sing the phrase, breathe more laterally into your rib cage. You kind of keep bouncing back and forth between low breathing and high breathing or lateral, not high breathing, and see which one seems to give you the better result for the style of music you’re singing, right.

Matt: And I’m not the only person who talks about this. There’s another pedagogy, one of the big-name voice teachers at Ohio State University, his name is Dr. Scott McCoy. He’s a classical voice teacher and when he lectures, he talks about this as well. There is no one size fits all breathing strategy. You need to help each person find the breathing strategy for the style of music they’re singing, for the vibrational mode of their vocal folds and specific to their body type.

Mike: I love it. I love the fact that it’s not necessarily one answer fits all. It’s kind of an explore what works for you. I’ll share the one thing that I remember learning, again, this applies to me, as I needed to breathe into my epigastrium and that’s why I just found when I did that, that got me to [inaudible 00:47:30] and breathe low and laterally together by actually … You’re not breathing into the diaphragm, the epigastrium, I think it’s a muscle, right, and that’s more towards the upper part of your abdomen, right.

Matt: Yeah, it’s a region.

Mike: So if I breathe into that.

Matt: Yeah, it’s a region of your body and essentially what you’re doing is you’re releasing those muscles and the muscles that you’re releasing are those abdominal muscles, especially what’s called the rectus abdominal muscle, which connects your pelvis to your sternum and it’s what helps you bend over. It’s also what gives you a six-pack or an eight pack. And so when your teacher is getting you to release that [crosstalk 00:48:06].

Mike: Oh, that’s because my six-pack was getting in the way.

Matt: [Crosstalk 00:48:09], Mike, is ’cause you’re too ripped, too ripped.

Mike: If only.

Matt: But yeah, so that’s the common part of releasing that because if you hold that tight, it holds down on your sternum and it does prevent your rib cage from expanding for a lot of people. So let that be a little bit softer in there can really, yeah, help you get more movement.

Mike: Good. Okay so, Casey, if you have more questions, I say work with a teacher to like let’s examine how you’re breathing because you may be breathing correctly, you may need some adjustments, maybe some other exercises to try depending on your individual body type. I think that’s really where we’d go with that one.

Matt: [Crosstalk 00:48:54]. I mean I think so many singers are looking for the right thing and instead of looking for the right thing, go look and figure out what all the sounds are that you can make. Go into a room, make bright sounds, make dark sounds, breathe low, breathe in the middle part of your body, take a small breath, take a big breath, just make a bunch of noises, make a bunch of sounds, explore your instrument, right. So many times we’re so worried about getting it right that we don’t explore and it’s half the time, it’s through exploration that you make the greatest discoveries.

Mike: Yeah. I mean that’s so truthful. Just getting comfortable with your own sound and trying a bunch of different things. And I’d say you want to be safe with anything you’re getting off the internet. Don’t do anything that hurts. If you try it, sometimes you do have to go to fatigue and keep trying the same thing to build muscle after a few days, but definitely exploring and finding a teacher and some outside ears to help guide you in that process is instrumental in developing as an artist.