The CoMMUNITY SINGer

Hello and welcome back to The Community Singer, episode three, with me, Abi.

So, today what I'm going be talking about is the first of the core principles of singing, and that is, of course, breath. Without breath, we can't sing - we can't do anything, we can't talk, and it's essential for us to really start to understand how the breath works, in terms of singing, in order for the voice to be at its most optimum usage and power.

So, the first thing we're going to talk about is how the breath works and singing. If I say to you, take a breath.

Do it now, let’s see what happens.

We all tend to take a breath into the chest because that's how we think about breath being used and the chest lifting up. Do it with me, put the breath into the chest area. Take a breath, and feel that the chest is rising.

This is absolutely one way of breathing, and we've all been able to do that. So, if you can do that and just feel with me one more time how it feels to breathe into the chest.

Imagine if you were doing that lots and lots of times, ie if you were singing. Can you imagine what might happen if you were breathing into your chest? I'll tell you what happens - it gets tighter and tighter and tighter and that's no good because we don't want any tension at all when we're singing.

Therefore, what we need to do is try and find lower abdominal breath instead of into the chest. You may have done some pilates, some yoga, something like that, and you'd be starting to understand about how breath can be used in different parts of the body, all just by focusing where we take the breath and how we let the breath come out. So, first of all, I want you to try and find this abdominal breath with me. What we're going do is we're going to blow out all of the air that we've got, just our natural air source, blow it all out as if you're blowing out the candle. Are you ready?

And breathe.

Go again.

And breathe.

Hopefully, now what you're feeling is the breath is perhaps moving from this high breath at the top and coming down lower. Let's do it again this time and try to direct the breath into this lower abdominal area. We're talking about the area underneath the waist band. So, if you imagine you've got a belt on, it's the below area that we're trying to focus on.

So, let's blow out all those candles and then just take that breath in and try and really direct the air down into the lower, abdominal area. Here we go.

Breath in, breath out.

Let it all go, and just fill up here.

And breath in.

Good. It might make you feel a little bit light headed at first, that’s quite normal. If you need to have a seat while you're doing this, absolutely fine. You can do this sitting down or even better, you can do this lying down. I tend to tell people when they’re first starting their singing practice, their breathing work, to do this lying down. The best time to do it is when you're lying down before you go to sleep at nighttime.

Lie in bed, just get super relaxed, and it's almost like a meditation process. Start thinking about the breath coming in, where the breath is, perhaps, put your hands on your tummy so you can really start feeling that air moving from this high chest area where we tend to breathe during the day, into a lower abdominal area.

If you look at babies, or small children, and you watch them when they're asleep, you'll see them breathing into the abdominal area. This is because it's the most natural way to breathe. So, when we're babies, we will be breathing like this all the time. And probably when you're asleep, you're breathing like this as well. It's just that adult life, rushing around has created this way of breathing into our chest, which is not allowing the breath to get to the full length of our lungs. And this type of breathing into the lower abdomen is the most natural and the most easy way of breathing, and the most calm and peaceful, relaxed way of breathing. And that's what we're always trying to do; find this lower abdominal breathing so that we can be relaxed, have no tension at all while we're singing.

So, first of all, you're going to do with me now. We're going to breathe out again the same way we did before blowing all the candles out, and then feeling as if we're trying to expand this lower tummy as we're breathing in. Imagine that you're blowing up a balloon and it's getting larger, that’s your tummy, as you're taking the breath in and then, as you're breathing out, you're going to feel like you're squashing that balloon down. You're pushing all of the air out and it's coming up into the vocal folds. So, what we're going to do is take a breath, naturally, opening the tummy up.

And then breathe out, pull everything away.

As you can see on me as I take a breath in, my tummy expands gets bigger.

And then as I breathe out, I'm going to pull all those muscles in until my tummy is as flat as it can be.

Same again, take a breath, and breathe out.

Take a breath, make the balloon go bigger, and breathe out.

As you can see, I'm breathing in with my mouth open because this is the most direct way to let the air just come in and using gravity, the force of gravity takes the air down into that lower abdominal area. We try not to breathe in through our nose when we're singing because that has obstruction and if you've got a blocked up nose in any way, it's gonna be more difficult. So, generally for singing, our mouth is open as we take a breath and then we just let the air fill up using gravity and then we pull in to get rid of all of the air.

So, in singing, we can call this ‘SPLAT’, and I often use this terminology. It's a very simple and very effective because what we're trying to do as we release that breath, we're trying to ‘splat’ the tummy to get it big again. So we pull in and we ‘splat’, everything gets released. All of the tension is released, and everything is super relaxed for us to go again.

SPLAT stands for Singers Please Loosen Abdominal Tension and that's what we're trying to do every time. So instead of me saying that to you, I'm just going say “splat”, and that means that the tummy relaxes and fills up with air. Okay?

Let's give it a go. So you're gonna take your natural breath in.You're gonna breathe out. This time we're gonna breathe out on a sound like an ‘sh’ sound. We're gonna breathe everything out, and then we're gonna splat the tummy, loosen the abdominal tension, let everything go, and it's as if you just relax and it let everything go in one go.

Here we go. Take a breath, blow out on the ‘sh’.

Ready to splat? And again, ready to splat? Lovely.

Hopefully, you can feel that starting to work. The best way you can practice this kind of breathing is lying down. So, as I mentioned before, lying in bed or even just sitting is a really good way to practice this. The benefit of lying down is that your body is supported and you can feel completely relaxed and allow the breath to go into the lower abdominal area without having any tension whatsoever in the chest.

We're now going to move on to some exercises to help practice your breath control. So, we've already just blown out the candles using that (exhales) just getting rid of the breath like you would do if you were blowing out candles. So, now we're going move on to some more particular exercises which are going to be without any sounds whatsoever to allow the air to come up from the tummy and be managed by you in order to make sounds. The sounds we're going to go through are ‘sh’, like an ‘f’ sound, an long ’s’ sound and a a ‘th’ sound. Four sounds that we're going to look at and we're going to do these in rotations so you start getting used to them.

So first of all, let's just try them all out. Let's start with the ‘sh’ sound.

So we're going take that relaxed breath. Breathe out on a ‘sh’. Here we go.

Splat the breath, and again.

Splat the breath.

Let's go to that ’s’ sound.

Splat.

Now let's go to that ‘f’ sound, long ‘f’. Here we go.

Splat.

And lastly, the ‘th’ sound.

Here we go.

And again, and splat.

So those are our four core sounds for breath work.

The best way you can practice is, again, lying down or sitting on a chair or standing once you start to feel more familiar with them. Let's now do a call and response. So, I’m going do one, and you are going to do one after me. you’re going to repeat what I've done.

What you need to do is take your breath, fill up your air supply whilst I'm making my sound. So this is all about managing and controlling breath because in order to use our breath to sing, we have to manage it well as just be able to do it. So I'm going to do a sound and then you are going to repeat it. Here we go. We're gonna do it to a click, I'll show you how it will happen. So, I will do, you will do.

And then, as I’m doing my next sound, you are filling up.

Taking your breath in, and then breathing your sound out. Taking your breath in always to four counts, three, four, and then breathing your breath out. Here we go.

You're breathing in.

And lastly, on ‘f’.

Lovely. Go back to your normal breath, your tidal breath as we call it,  just your normal everyday in and out breath.

As I have said before, if you start to feel light headed, give yourself a break, come back to it because sometimes when we're starting to use the breath in a way that we never have done before, You're really taking in a lot of oxygen. It can really make you feel a bit spinny, and that's absolutely fine. Just take a seat and then come back to it when you feel like you're back to normal again. If you're enjoying this work on breath control, you can have a look at where this all comes from, and it's from a method of breathing called the ‘Accent Method’. The link is on the screen now for you to go and investigate further about the Accent Method and do some more work.

See you next time.