How to Breathe Correctly to Protect Your Singing Voice

Correct breathing can help you to be the best singer you can be. Not only will it help you sing, but breathing correctly will help you relax for those tense moments when the spotlight’s on you!

Steps

1. The most important part about learning to breath freely is to practice noticing how it is that you breathe. The more you know about your own habits, the easier it will be to release tensions and achieve free-flow while breathing.
2. Breathe in so that your torso expands in all directions (downwards into your bowels, forward in your stomach and ribcage, backward in your lower back and ribcage and up into your shoulders [be sure not to raise your shoulders, however]). Remember not to hold anything in place, meaning, let the body do what it does. Allow your breath to touch the very bottom of your torso, breathe as deeply as possible. As you get more into the technique, your back and sides will move with your breathing.
3. Do not force your breath out. When you place your finger in front of your mouth, your breath should feel warm and sensuous. It should fall out of you, rather than being pushed. It should also be silent. The more noise made while breathing, the more tension there is.
4. Practice noticing the breath with everything you do, singing (or playing any other instrument), talking, exercising, or doing nothing in particular. Notice what happens to the breath while doing different activities.
5. Do breathing exercises to increase the amount of control you have with your diaphragm. To help build stamina and strength, breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, then breathe out for four seconds. After you have mastered this, move to 6-6-6, then 8-8-8, all the way to 20-20-20, but do not go past 20.
6. Try not to think in terms of mastering breath. The best way to approach it, is to be a continual student. The moment you think you have mastered something, you stop learning.

Tips

* Have good posture. Get your shoulders back (not way back, but not way forward), back straight, feet on the floor, shoulders relaxed.
* When breathing in, pretend you are smelling a rose.
* When breathing out, pretend there is a lit candle right in front of you, and you need to avoid blowing it out.
* Pretend your diaphragm area is a balloon, getting bigger when air is put in, and getting smaller when you breathe out.
* In this way, you are controlling duration through varied ‘compression of the bellows’ instead of ‘restriction of the throat’, an all too common problem.

Written by Lifestyle Review Editor - Visit Website