Three Secrets to Sneaking a Breath

Sneaky breaths are underrated!

Yes, it’s important to learn to take full, relaxed, high-quality breaths that will give you the air you need to spin long, beautiful lines.

But it’s also important to learn to sneak!

A sneaky breath, discreetly folded into a musical phrase, offers you the ability to sustain your musical intention while simultaneously protecting the quality of your tone. It opens up phrasing possibilities you might not have thought were possible. Sneaky breaths are practical, powerful, and, if executed correctly, close to undetectable!

But they do take skill! Here’s how to make them work for you.

Think Small

Sneaky breaths are basically tiny sips of air. They’re roughly equivalent in volume to the amount of air you’re taking in with each inhale as you’re reading this article (and they should feel similarly relaxed!). Especially on soprano and alto recorders, a tiny amount of air can take you a long way.

End Cleanly

One of the most common mistakes I hear people make when they attempt to sneak a breath is that they allow the impending breath to affect, in a detrimental way, the quality of the note immediately prior. Don’t telegraph your intention to breathe early: Wait until you’ve cleanly ended the note right before. And make sure your air stream stays level right up until the very end of that note!

Begin Softly

Sneaking a breath effectively is all about giving the illusion of a continued musical line. This means keeping the air level before the breath, as outlined above. And it also means that you need to enter after your intake of air with a sense that the breath was a mere suspension in on ongoing line. Practically, this means two things: The tongue stroke of your next note needs to be very soft, and your post-breath airstream needs to precisely match what came before.

The next time you’re practicing sneaky breaths, try out a few of these instructions. I predict more effective sneaking ahead!

Are you wondering not only how to sneak a breath, but where to do it? I’ve developed a practical, step-by-step process for ensuring your breathing supports, rather than disrupts, your music. My Webinar replay Where Do I Breathe? covers this and more.

Three Top Breathing Mistakes....and How to Avoid Them

Ah, breathing! Breathing is literally the one activity we are all doing all the time….so you’d think breathing as we play would be simple, right?

Alas, breathing for recorder playing is a more complex process than breathing for, say, Great British Bake Off reruns. And as with any complex process, it can go awry in multiple ways.

Fortunately or unfortunately, these ways tend to be fairly predictable. (As an aside, I can almost always tell if another wind instrument lurks in a student’s past by observing them breathe- and a good chunk of the time, I can even tell which one!)

So what can go wrong? Here are three of the patterns I see most often in the wild.

1) Nose breathing In a world of near-infinite complexity, sometimes it’s nice to be able to give a nice, straightforward answer to a question.

So: Should breathe through your nose to play recorder?

No.

No nose.

Your nose, for the duration of your playing, is dead to you.

Why? A couple of excellent reasons. First, your nasal passages are a heck of a lot smaller than your oral passage, which means that moving air through them is much less efficient. if you breathe through your nose, you are resigning yourself to taking in less air in more time- never a great idea.

The second reason is less intuitive, but also important: It has to do with your velum (otherwise known as the soft palate). In order to achieve a resonant tone, you want to raise your velum as you play. Want to know how to raise it? Yawn- you’ll feel how your velum lifts to close off the nasal cavity from the oral cavity, increasing the size of your resonating chamber and preventing the movement of air between your mouth and nose. If velum is raised, as it should be, nose breathing is not possible.

Instead of breathing through your nose, gently release your top lip from the instrument to take in air through your mouth.

2) Assuming less is more. Repeat after me: There is no trophy for fewest breaths taken.

I feel like many of us carry around the unspoken idea, perhaps formed in the bowels of 7th grade band, that the longer you can go without taking a breath, the cooler you are. Alas, not so! Striving, consciously or subconsciously, to take as few breaths as possible can get have many unfortunate consequences, from inhaling so deeply the air becomes difficult to control, to squeezing out uncomfortable-sounding notes at the ends of breaths, to “hoarding” breath and consequently producing a weak tone, to skipping over important musical phrase breaks.

Breathing is an integral part of playing a wind instrument- embrace it!

3) Doing too much. All sorts of breathing woes fall into this category, but they boil down to this: Breathing for recorder should feel relatively easy. If it feels arduous or effortful, chances are you are overfunctioning, doing more muscular work than you need - or should- do.

Instead, try to find a way of breathing that allows for the minimum of muscular effort to meet your needs. I promise you’ll be happier.

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(Want to go more into depth on breathing? I loooveve this topic, and have a whole webinar on breathing for sale here.)

(Bonus tip: fire does not improve things.)