The most common self-assessment I hear from people discussing their own voice and who want to improve their singing, by far, is:
“I think I’m doing a good job, I just need to work on my breathing“
Of course, other comments are common:
“I need to work on my tone”
“my vocal quality still needs work”
“I reach the high notes but it doesn’t sound that good”
But these are vastly outstripped (or accompanied) by self-assessments of “breathing issues“.
I understand why this comes up.
Many singers will typically think they sound alright, but notice that they run out of breath during specific lines, struggle to finish phrases, etc.
Typically, they feel like they’ve got full lungs of *something* but physically feel like they have to empty and refill before the next section of the song, etc. Breathing is critically important for singing, but I’ve got news for you: breathing probably isn’t your main problem. In fact, most singers’ breathing is typically fine, and the issue lies elsewhere.
Let’s do a quick demonstration to prove my point.
Firstly, breathe in as deeply as you can, and hold it for a second.
Then, breathe out. Repeat this a few times in different ways, e.g. with your mouth open, closed, with a small opening to your mouth, just through your nose, slow, fast, etc.
You have just demonstrated two things:
1) You are already perfectly capable and in control of your breathing. You are perfectly able of refilling/refueling your lungs, emptying them, and doing that repeatedly. If you didn’t know how to breathe you’d have been in severe need of medical intervention long before now.
2) You’ve just covered all the ways you can control your airflow with breath alone. The issue is that everything we’ve just done breathing wise took place WITHOUT the involvement of your vocal folds. To discuss breathing in singing without talking about engagement of the vocal folds is utterly pointless.
When we are singing, we are not simply breathing out.
In a simplified form, we are directing air from our lungs through our larynx to generate vibration in the vocal folds.
The vocal folds not only make sound, they actually come together (adduct) to resist and regulate the airflow during their vibration (phonation). The folds are capable of exerting a huge amount of control over airflow, resistance to airflow, and their consequent vibration.
As such, if you feel like you’re having problems with your breathing when you are singing, it is a consequence of insufficient control of our vocal folds in regulating your airflow, and not a consequence of breathing issues per se.
Weakness in the folds
For some people, it’s that their vocal folds have insufficient muscle tone for good contraction and adduction, such that they cannot effectively resist the air pressure directed at them from the lungs/diaphragm setup. Symptoms of this can often be a breathy tone, weak lower range, a pronounced switch from lower range to higher range, etc. Such singers will generally find it easier to ascend than descend, but often lacks substance to the sound.
In more extreme cases of this muscle weakness (e.g. older singers, or people who recovering from surgery with long periods of vocal rest), the vibrato is also negatively affected, often developing more of an uncontrolled wobble than a consistent ‘spin’ to the vibrato. Often this is misdiagnosed as a breathing or support issue, when it is actually an issue occurring at the vocal fold level.
Excessive adduction
For others, their vocal folds are coming together with too much force. This is usually more a male-centric issue, but due to the masculinisation of the female pop sound, I notice more and more female singers struggling with this. In such cases, the sound is typically quite pressed/forced even to the untrained ear. Such singers tend to complain of an inability to sing both long phrases, and for long periods of time.
In more extreme cases on this side, I’ve even had some singers (usually church singers) say that they are “fine for the first 10 minutes of a set, then my voice starts to struggle“. Hopefully as I write this, you can see this isn’t normal. So please, if anyone reading this is finding that 10-20 minutes of singing is exhausting your voice, get some help with your voice, as this is not normal.
Don’t panic! Cut yourself some slack.
Look, my primary goal with this article is to highlight that 99% of the time, someone’s issues in their singing typically aren’t rooted in their breathing, or support, or anything connected to that. Nevertheless, don’t beat yourself up if this applies to you.
Bear in mind that your vocal folds are also trying to get the pitch right, achieve good tone, not be too tense nor too slack, vibrate freely, etc. They can also become tired or fatigued, even whilst you progress through a song. Age plays a part, and natural change can be hard to keep pace with or combat. The vocal folds are capable of many subtle configurations and modes of operations, only some of which are critical to good singing and regulation of airflow, and many of which are not conducive to this.
You are asking your vocal folds to do a huge number of things when you sing, AND on top of that they need to regulate airflow well. This is to enable you to keep singing well them over lines of a song with no breaks, inconsistencies or interruptions to the flow of the lyric/melody.
My point with this article is that when it comes to singing, it’s not as simple as “I need to work on my breathing“. Of course, at higher levels of singing breath control does warrant focus, but in the first instance this is usually people mistakenly attributing breathing as the root cause to a wholly different issue. It really comes down to developing better and more appropriate control of your vocal folds and your instrument. By doing this, breath control, support, etc, all will take care of themselves with very little thought.
Learn More: Related Articles
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