Singing For Dummies. Pamelia S. Phillips
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out helps them slowly move back in. After their abdomen moves back in, some singers squeeze their throat to continue singing. You can explore the outie method to see whether imagining your body staying wide during exhalation helps you slow the movement of your ribs and abdominal muscles and extend your breath.
Posturing yourself for breathing
Breathing efficiently when you sing is a combination of great posture (see Chapter 3) and skillful inhaling and exhaling. (See the sections, “Practicing Inhalation” and “Practicing Exhalation,” later in this chapter.) Remember the importance of good posture: It allows you to get a deep, full breath. If you slouch or you’re too rigid, your diaphragm locks and prevents you from getting a full breath for singing. (Refer to the nearby sidebar for more insight.) If your breathing and your posture work together as a team, you can improve your singing.
To sing your best, you want to develop good posture while you breathe. When your body is aligned correctly, taking and using an efficient breath is easier.
Practicing Inhalation
When you sing, you want to be confident that you can take in air and then use it efficiently to sing your song. Knowing how to open your body for inhalation allows you to get the breath in your body skillfully and with little effort. Inhaling is simple: Open your body, and the air comes rushing in. Read on for exercises and information to develop skillful inhalation technique.
BREATHING JARGON
If you’ve had some singing lessons, you may be confused by all the phrases and terms singers use to describe breathing. Your voice teacher or choir director may have said, “Support that note” or “Sing on breath!” If those commands make sense to you, congratulations! I always thought they were confusing, because the word support can mean so many things.
Support probably became a popular term for breathing for singing because of the Italian word appoggio, which means “to support” or “to lean your body into the breath.” Support means using your body to control the breath and sound so your throat stays free and open.
Appoggio also implies that singers flex their body or ribs open as they sing and leave the body open during exhalation. (This is similar to the outie method mentioned in the “Exhaling to sing” section in this chapter.) This may sound confusing, but it will make more sense as your understanding of your own breathing habits improves with practice.
Singing on breath is what you’re supposed to do all the time. If someone says, “Sing on the breath,” they’re telling you to connect the breath to the tone or start the sound by connecting air. You can grunt and make a sound, but that’s not applying air or singing on the breath. You can also blow too much air and make a breathy sound, which isn’t what it means to sing on the breath. The process in between those two is what you’re looking for.
In the future, ask the person to be more specific if you’re confused by the phrase they use. But it’s okay if you don’t know every singing cliché. How can you know them all yet? The singing world uses so many.
Opening your body
Taking in air quickly and quietly is one of the goals for singing. To get the air in quickly, you want to open your body — your back, ribs, sides, and abs. You can open all these areas at the same time, but explore each area separately before trying to activate them all together.
Moving back for inhalation
If you think of your back or spine connected to your ribs, it makes sense that opening your back helps your breathing. You want to quickly open your back so air falls into your lungs. Remember that the lungs are connected to the ribs, so moving the ribs and the back moves the lungs.
1 Find a sturdy chair and sit with your elbows resting on your knees.In this position, you sit and lean forward, with your elbows on your bent knees and your back straight. You don’t have to bend over far — only far enough to allow your back to relax.
2 With your elbows on your knees, take a breath and imagine that you can put the air into your back — as if your lungs are all along your back and you want to fill them with air.You may notice that the muscles in your back feel like they’re lifting and opening for the air to come in the body.
3 Take a few more breaths and notice the sensations of your back opening.
4 When you think you feel your back releasing and opening as you inhale, try opening your back more quickly.Open the same muscles along your back without worrying about inhalation. When you open the muscles, the air comes into your body and you don’t have to worry about inhalation — the inhalation happens because you’re opening the muscles.
You can also squat down and place your hands on your back to feel the movement of the muscles. If you have a practice buddy, ask them to put their hands on your back as you try expanding your back. Or you can ask them to try the same exercise so you can feel how their back moves. Feeling the movement of someone else’s body may help you know what’s happening to yours.
If sitting in the chair isn’t comfortable, try lying on your back with your knees bent to feel the opening of your back. Lie on the floor and feel the opening of your back along the floor as you inhale. Notice the movement of the upper part of your back and the lower part of your back, all the way down to your hips.
Flexing the ribs
The rib cage has 12 pairs of ribs. (Yes, men and women have the same number of ribs.) You can view the skeleton in Chapter 3 to see that the first seven pairs of ribs are connected to the sternum, and the next three ribs are connected to rib No. 7, to make the curved shape in the front of the rib cage. The last two ribs aren’t attached in the front of the rib cage; these ribs are called floating ribs.
You don’t have to remember the number of ribs, but you want to remember that the top of your rib cage has more movement from front to back in your body and that the lower