‘Help! I ran out of air while singing a long phrase or I don’t even know how it happened!’. It’s happened to all singers but learning how to breathe is quite literally a skill.
Singers breathe from their mouths in gulps, this allows them to swallow a huge amount of air in a fraction compared to breathing from their noses. Mastering breathwork as a technique is a mandatory skill for singers and something one must not take lightly. It’s a deliberate attempt to control your air intake.
It’s a fundamental thing we all do right? Breathe in and then out. But breathing in singing is something that needs a lot of deliberate practice to become second nature. But we all have to do it.
It’s a Technique
I can’t stress enough how much breathwork is important for singers.
Knowing and even missing a breath while singing is going to hinder your performance. If you don’t develop a good habit of good breathwork control then you can’t really keep on singing well.
The more that you breathe the longer the phrase of your singing has to be.
Depending on the way that you wish to sound and how long a phrase is will determine how much you breathe. As you can imagine, breathwork for singers is an essential technique that they must master.
The more you are aware of it the more you’ll be able to do it without thinking about it. That’s essentially practice but breathwork must come naturally as you allow it to become a part of you.
Even though you technically do breathe from your mouth for larger gulps of air, which is contrary to how we breathe normally it’s a technique nonetheless.
On this website, I talk a lot about how important technique is and if you’re someone who wants to get good at singing, you will have to master various techniques by doing mindful practice (or deliberate practice).
Other Instruments Do It Too
Any musical instrument that relies on air, like the saxophone, clarinet, or even french horn relies on its player to supply the air to begin playing.
If the technique is wrongly executed then the instrument will not perform. Technique is that important.
Learn to Breathe
One of the best ways to learn how to breathe when you’re covering a song is to listen to the breath cues.
It’s the moment right before a singer starts to sing and if you listen closely you will hear them taking that big gulp of air to sing the phrase they’re about to sing.
I’d like to warn you of this, once you hear it, there’s no going back and the moment you start to put your mind to it, you will hear it again and again. There will be no turning a blind ear to it. It’ll be there, all the time.
Don’t worry you will be able to enjoy listening to music.
Earlier I said that it’s plausible only when you’re covering a song but in reality, you can listen to them and observe how they did it so you can replicate their results and use them for yourself.
It’ll allow you to gain the experience of breathwork from someone else’s work and then apply it again to your own understanding.
You’ll Need to Practice
Don’t think that you are going to be a natural at it though.
Every singer who was ever picked up singing at some point in their life had to walk through all of this. So, it is not something that only you have to work on.
It is not a natural instinct for us to think about breathing while we are talking because while you are talking you can take a breath anytime you want. Our natural reaction to taking a breath while we are talking is to do it whenever we feel like it or whenever we’re out of breath.
But when you are singing it needs to be a calculated decision because if you take a breath at the wrong time you cannot only break the flow of the lyric or the phrase that you are singing but you can also break the flow of what the whole song sounds like. Listeners may not be able to understand or say which part of your singing felt off but they will feel it.
It’s a very grave thing because 99% of the time singers are burdened with the melody. So if you are burdened with the idea of singing the melody then obviously you need to make sure you do the right thing with no mistakes.
It’s a big task but something that you can overcome with practice. It’ll come, I promise.
It’s Something Every Singer Needs
The way that you begin to master it and the way that you ought to think about it is that breathwork is a technique. Se? Back to the basics.
Technique is essentially, I keep saying it and harking about it in every article, the way that you make a sound in music.
So when you are breathing you need to realize that it is a technique.
A technique that needs to be mastered by you.
And as said before the more that you do it, the more natural it becomes, obviously you need to be able to make your practice time count.
The reason I keep mentioning that it’s a technique and you need to practice it is that it’s something that anyone can master. Isn’t that wonderful? It’s doable, it’s possible.
Learn to Sing as a Whole
But you can’t practice learning to breathe just by itself, imagine standing in the room with the correct posture and breathing in gulps of air. Someone might even think that something is wrong with you.
You need to practice singing as a whole.
It’s only when you start to incorporate actual singing that you will be able to work on your breathing as a whole and not as something that you can improve just by itself.
That’s how you improve your singing, as a whole. Breathing is just a part of it, albeit a very important one.
After this, you will start to see overlaps and how things connect. If a certain phrase is this long you need to sing it like this. The reason it becomes second nature so fast is that you already do breathe for talking but you just don’t calculate it.
Best Way to Learn to Sing
If you’ve ever wondered what might be the best way for someone to learn how to sing, it’s going to be an online course that will help you the most.
If you don’t believe me then you can check this article out and learn about it yourself. But I have also made a list of courses that I know you would love to have if you were to take that plunge. Here.
How Breathing is Different between Singing and Speaking
The biggest difference you have when you’re breathing when you’re speaking or singing is that you can cut off between a syllable when you’re speaking and it’s an imperfection we expect to hear these days.
When you’re singing, however, you can’t do that. It’s not something anyone does.
You can forget words and even speak imperfect sentences when you’re speaking but doing that in singing is a very big no-no.
How Learning Other Instruments Can Help
I have written an article in which I talk about how learning other instruments can help you greatly and you can read about it here.
If you’d like to consider learning breathwork on a completely different level then picking up an instrument that requires air to function is going to be great.
Brass, woodwinds, and even a harmonica are great options.
The whole idea of phrasing and learning how to do it is going to be ingrained in you, it may not translate 1:1 to singing but it will help you a lot.
Building Stamina
And don’t worry about the stamina for singing.
Like everything else in music, you need to practice for it. If you’d like to know how much singing is too much, you can read it here.
I talked a lot about practice and how it’s important to master technique, that’s why I have written an article just regarding this for you. It will guide you on how you can go from just 30 minutes of singing practice to even four hours of practice but also explains why four hours is the limit.
You can read about it here.
I hope you had a wonderful read and remember, don’t forget to breathe.
