YOUR REAL VOICE Archive

YOUR REAL VOICE - the vocal ezine for real people

FEATURE EDITORIAL

Are We STILL Breathing?????.....Yes!

Happy Labor Day Weekend (at least here in the states, for our international readers)!  So what am I doing?  Working!  But actually, I'm working today instead of yesterday because I wanted to wait to write this issue of YRV until I really had a handle on what  to say about breathing.  Once again, it is YOU the YRV readers that have brought out my best work!  Thank you.

I received a great email question that is the inspiration for today's article.  A few weeks ago in YRV I re-wrote the following about myself:  "I took on mastering breathing and support, and then studied only that specific skill until I had it mastered. For the entire eighteen months of lessons and practice, my technical focus was on great breathing and support in the voice. During that time, I did NOT worry about improving high notes, or fixing my tongue or tone or resonance or any other issue. I just focused solely on mastery of breath support."  (Originally in YRV #17, 1/5/2006, "Make the most of your vocal goals in 2006" article)

I then received this question (edited by me):  "How did you do it?   I would like to know your daily regimen to attain this goal.  I am a formula type person, and when I know the elements of the formula, I can  them commit to following it..." GREAT question!  How DID I do it?  I never stopped to think about the formula, so thanks for asking!  

Here's the basic steps of what I did:
I took four one-hour voice lessons with a teacher who is an expert in breath support and teaching it to advanced students.   I taped each of those lessons and practiced TO THE LESSON TAPE every day for an hour.  Each week the lesson changed, so my practice routine for the first month changed each week according to what we had done in my lesson.    
 
Once I had learned the new breathing technique from the month of lessons and practice, I took all the best exercises and techniques from the four lessons and combined them into a new hour-long practice routine on a new tape.  This became the new practice tape that I did each day for an hour until the technique was completely built into my body.  This took an additional six weeks of practice an hour each day beyond the initial month of lessons.  

At this point, the new breathing technique had only been done in my private practice sessions and had not been tested on an individual song.  That's right!  I ONLY did the skills practice for the first ten weeks!  Then I returned to my regular choir singing schedule, so the first time the new breathing was "road tested" on an actual song, it was right in front of my regular voice teacher and conductor, who heard the difference in the voice right away!  That's how I knew I was on the right track and had done all of the practice correctly.  

Since she affirmed that everything was working, I shifted my practice routine to working on singing specific songs.  These were performed twice each week when she could hear my voice and all the results.   All the literature I worked on was either really difficult stuff I picked, or classical choral works my conductor selected.  All the solo works I selected particularly to challenge the voice and take the new technique almost to its limit, so I could really swing out and see what the "new" voice could do.  The choral works test technique because they are often a mix of some really challenging passages, and some that are easy, when it's tempting to let the my mind wander.  

The crucial factor that made all of this work was that, at this point in the routine, I MENTALLY shifted the goal.  After ten weeks of only focusing on learning the technique and how it worked and felt in my body, I adjusted my focus.  For the next ten months,  I only focused on two specific things:  1) a relaxed inhale at a specific place in the music or text and 2) sustaining the breath out during the exhale, which is the actual singing.  Why this made a difference is that EVERYTHING I sang got filtered through "when to inhale and how to be relaxed on the inhale" to get the best result and "how relaxed can I be while air is going out and I'm making noise."  THAT'S IT!  That's ALL I paid attention to for ten months!   Every time I sang while teaching a lesson to someone else, performing or even singing in the car, I used those two focus points and didn't pay attention to anything else.  What I can see now, a full two years later, is that I switched my MENTAL focus from "learning" to "mastery."  Notice I didn't really DO anything different when I sang.  Instead I created two goals that would result in mastery over the long term.  I took something big and very imposing, the lofty idea of "mastery" and brought if down to a very winnable game in the immediate every time I sang.  It's easy to keep score when the only way to score points is "relax" and "breathe in" or "make noise."
It's REALLY hard to keep score in the game of mastery!    I did this until I wrote the article in January, when I proposed the idea of vocal goals.  Since then, I've only worked on the new goals, and the breathing has taken care of itself.  

So those are the steps that worked for me in mastering the breathing.  Looking back now, one of the biggest things that made a difference was that I was willing to work on it for as long as it took.  This in no way means that I'm done for life in the area of  support in the voice!  What it does mean is that my breathing technique is "built in" and no longer takes lots of focus while I sing.  I actually have experienced this past year being completely returned to why I started singing.  I have felt profoundly connected to the music on an emotional level for the past year.  I suspect this is because breathing, which is such a huge time-and-brain consuming issue for singers has been built into my body and moved to the back burner.  I am freed up to focus on meaning, rather than technique, and it has been a GREAT year of singing for me!  

Incidentally, since some of you often ask about this point:
In regards to the series of voice lessons I took that started all of this, my regular teacher and conductor who hears me sing twice a week recommended it.   My teacher knew exactly what was going on with my voice (since she hears it) AND the specialist's work and reputation in breath support issues and technique.  Yet another reason NOT to listen to yourself when you sing!  The person listening to the voice picks up a lot more about the technique than the singer.  My teacher had just gone through a series of voice lessons to deal with her own breathing and support issues, due to how she had been originally trained.  Since she had such a great result working with a particular teacher on a totally new method of breathing, she suspected it would be great for me.  She had previously worked really hard with me on breathing and had taught me everything she knew.  When she learned new breathing, she wanted me to learn it, too.  GREAT CHOICE on her part, and I am eternally grateful to her, since it's a great breathing method, works better than what I'd originally trained in and has been great for my voice.  I trust her totally and am so blessed to have her as a teacher, conductor and colleague.  She takes care of my voice as carefully as I do!