Lately, playing a very large tuba with a very large capillary bore - a B-flat tuba which is also obviously longer than my F/E-flat/C instruments - has brought my attention towards my own breathing.
With my other instruments, I have plenty of air for just about anything I encounter.
I’ve never been one who was satisfied to do the typical “tuba thing“ (breaking phrases due to needing more air to complete musical phrases of typical length). I prefer to play complete (typical) musical phrases with single breaths, whenever possible…
… so with this instrument, I’m concentrating on breathing deeper (now that - post surgery - stinging pains from expanding those abdominal muscles are mostly subsiding), but still doing so with comfort and without any extraneous motions or extraneous efforts.
Since the “look how amazing I am” YouTuba video has become a thing, I’ve noticed that several (remarkably accomplished) players pull their faces away from their instruments more than seemingly necessary and cock their heads to one side when taking a deep breath. I guess doing those extra things can make it seem as though one is taking in more air (sort of like making one’s nose honk when blowing one’s nose might seem as though one is removing more mucus from their nose), but I don’t see how those things help, and it seems to me that those extra efforts require more time to take in air, and that stuff (yes?) only makes quickly taking in a lot of air more frantic (and perhaps, more distracting to the patrons, as we all know that the reasons people attend live music concerts are 90% visual reasons).
From perhaps fifteen or so years ago, I remember some videos put out by a couple of tuba players about pulling in a whole bunch of air really fast… I never watched those videos, but is this something that was in those videos (yes? no?), or is this just something that other players have done on their own unconsciously?
I’ll move my mouth just far away from the mouthpiece to avoid making that gross inhaling-through-the-instrument noise, leave my head in the same position, strive to relax and not tighten/move any neck muscles, and just try to take it a whole bunch of air in a very fast yet as relaxed-as-possible manner.
Am I off track, here?
Any other exaggerated physical motions are counterproductive and also look ridiculous.
Some people spend outrageous amounts of time practicing with exaggerated physical motions that look ridiculous, and become highly successful in spite of -- or because of? -- the way they've done things.
I figure I already look ridiculous enough back there, no need to draw additional attention to myself. :)
Maybe this was only news to me back then, but many years ago someone pointed out that we can breathe more deeply (seemingly) through the nose but faster through the mouth, then that player taught me to breathe in through both nose and mouth at the same time. It was harder at first than I thought it would be, but after a lot of practice it became 2nd nature, and it did seem to work for me in that I could play longer phrases between breaths. YMMV
I prefer to inhale the contents of a helium balloon while playing. It isn't the fastest and can, at times, be a visual distraction for the audience but, it helps with my high register.
Having said that, I like @Jperry1466 's idea and will investigate. It seems to make sense.
i breathe thru both nose and mouth at the same time, but my sinuses are usually jammed up so nothing much gets thru there.
maybe it's my age, maybe my lack of practicing the past several months or maybe from the round of COVID i'm pretty sure i had back when it first started... i don't seem to have as MUCH air as i used to. but i'm also on a 186 now 'stead of the 2341, most of the time and using that williwaw mouthpiece which feels pretty open.
one of my bands is playing the 2nd holst suite and the conductor's in A BIG HURRY with it. maybe he thinks like FUNKY WINKERBEAN and has decided to play it fast so the bad notes don't last so long! anyway, i've played it several times and don't remember having problems making it through those phrases... at his tempo there's just no place to get a breath and i run out at the end where the notes go down to the low E at that volume. i can leave a note out and noone would notice BUT ME... i don't want to do that, so i'm practicing to REMEMBER to take in a B.F.B. (as i saw notated by someone else in another tune one time).
i've been playing a LOT of LOW LOW LOW register stuff and i start getting dizzy after about 45 minutes... sleepy. i feel like i'm really moving a LOT of air
I am always happy to see subjects here that have more to do with playing than the equipment we are stuck with.
Most of us might agree taking in too much air can be a problem. So it's only natural to pace the breath according to the equipment we are using. The writer does mention using mostly smaller equipment before taking on big bertha. I think we've all had moments in our playing life when moving huge amounts of air seemed to be demanded by the task at hand. I wonder if that was just the beginning of the "new normal" of discovering the amount of air needed to play the instrument. Once we master big air, maybe the next phase becomes finding the correct amount of air for the equipment we own. Holding too much air and not having enough air both cause problems and require attention and thought to master.
Fast forward a few years, decades, and now we have a 6/4. I think you will discover your ability to beath big is still with you... just needs time to move forward again. I predict in a few weeks you will acclimate and things will naturally progress. What you will probably notice is when you go back to the "F" or whatever, you will have more air than ever before.
An "air hog" or 6/4 can expose one's breathing habits. Not bad habits, just the habit of taking in less air for smaller horns.
Relaxing is certainly the key to taking in larger volumes of air. One habit I am still trying to "own" in my playing: When playing fast and high (most of my favorite pieces) I tense up across my back and the shoulders raise. When I take a breath I try and remember to drop/relax my shoulders. This dissipates most of the built-up tension in the back and torso. At least I start the next phase relaxed and with plenty of air.
Can't wait to hear you take that big horns through its paces.
Besides the head cocking, I’ve also seen another really great player arch their back when they take an air. I don’t see how this could be helping them, but they’re playing remarkably well in spite of it.
Again, sometimes taking an air has to be pretty frantic, and anything we do - that is extraneous - is probably just going to make it even more frantic.
In those 43 Bordogni vocalizes written in the tuba octave (taken from the 120 that Rochut selected for trombone), I notice a bunch of little parenthetical breath marks in the middles of phrases. It makes me wonder how efficient Mr. Roberts breathing was… or maybe he just assumed that students playing those haven’t yet mastered easy deep/quick/efficient breathing…(??) …and no: I’m not saying that I can make it through any originally soprano range phrase ever written for anyone or anything.
Probably, the more simply we think about breathing, the better we’re going to do it. Think about those comical skits where someone shows someone else all of the 15 different parts of a golf swing, and then someone tries to separately do all 15 during their swing, instead of a nice simple swing. I’ve stated before that probably the best “warm-up“ for playing is to take a brisk walk. It raises the heart rate a little bit, and gets the person naturally breathing deeply – perhaps reminding them of what they’re needing to do when they’re playing (at least to play certain phrases).
I don't pull my face away from the horn to breathe. I open wide and air comes in from the sides and through the nose (@Jperry1466 this came from Dave Kirk - most natural/relaxed way to breathe). Joe mentioned once that it sounded like I was breathing through the horn at times in some of my videos (which are certainly not intended as "look how amazing I am"). I'm not actually breathing through the horn in any way I can discern, but I suppose it can sound that way when taking large breaths, especially when using good mics. Nevertheless, I considered his friendly, well-intentioned observation and decided to make sure I wasn't sounding like a Mack truck in a wind tunnel. And I think it has helped. I work on breathing anyway, but not nearly as much as I should. And not being in a state of desired physical fitness these days, the challenges of free and relaxed breathing are surely increased.
But I'm definitely into fitness:
- fitness big-assed set of tires on my Jeep
- fitness entire buffet down my gullet
- fitness size 14 in somebody's ass who needs it
humBell wrote: ↑Sun Jun 12, 2022 8:58 pm
I give up.
What's the pun?
Is it that the phrase breath taking is usually used to describe the effect on an audience rather than the cost the performer pays? That is pretty subtle (like the b in subtle... honey smooth, but with a bit of a sting if one is careless) much like my pa's account of staying up to watch a "hair-raising story" only to get tired of the extra long commercial about how to keep one's coiffure in order. (i never saw it, but i imagine it should have involved Dapper Dan)
And my apologies for not contributing usefully to the discussion. I just kinda figured it was everyone else got light headed and woozy from playing the tuba, and the trick was not minding. That obviously puts me in the lower end of the spectrum, and thus all i could offer would be abstractions based on first principles, or some such.
(alright... probably not quite as bad as all that, and playing concerts on minimal sleep (especially tuba xmases) doesn't help. but certainly nothing i have to say is from perspective of wisdom and experience having solved the problem, hoping to help others through it)
humBell wrote: ↑Sun Jun 12, 2022 8:58 pm
I give up.
What's the pun?
Is it that the phrase breath taking is usually used to describe the effect on an audience rather than the cost the performer pays? That is pretty subtle (like the b in subtle... honey smooth, but with a bit of a sting if one is careless) much like my pa's account of staying up to watch a "hair-raising story" only to get tired of the extra long commercial about how to keep one's coiffure in order. (i never saw it, but i imagine it should have involved Dapper Dan)
And my apologies for not contributing usefully to the discussion. I just kinda figured it was everyone else got light headed and woozy from playing the tuba, and the trick was not minding. That obviously puts me in the lower end of the spectrum, and thus all i could offer would be abstractions based on first principles, or some such.
(alright... probably not quite as bad as all that, and playing concerts on minimal sleep (especially tuba xmases) doesn't help. but certainly nothing i have to say is from perspective of wisdom and experience having solved the problem, hoping to help others through it)
I don't know about puns, but this breath-taking thread has my attention. (double entendre intended)
I would argue that the ability to take in air quickly is something we already know how to do, and that was the point of the teaching of Arnold Jacobs. He argued against thinking about breathing in mechanical terms, but rather just take in a lot of air and let the machine's control system figure out the details.
I would refute the notion that cardiovascular fitness is all that closely related to breathing efficiency for the tuba. When I run, I don't breathe deeply--I take shallow breaths often. If I need all the air my lungs will hold while exercising, I'm not in an aerobic state and the next step is being out of breath. Obviously, if we are frail from lack of fitness, nothing that requires physical exertion will work very well. But I've heard some truly wonderful performers who were certainly not paragons of cardiovascular fitness. Being reasonably fit makes everything around tuba playing better, that's for sure. But we must recognize that 15 hours a week training for endurance sports (as I was doing when training for an Ironman) rather than 15 hours of chop time will not improve our playing.
I believe that great players are efficient with their air--a given amount of air makes more sound, both in terms of tone and volume. At a given level of tone-production efficiency, however, longer phrases will require more air, and the ability to play the longest phrases will depend on vital capacity rather than fitness. And vital capacity is largely a product of body morphology, unless we are doing something to prevent the full use of it.
I recall a conversation with Paul Haugan (I think) where players with the largest vital capacity had the ability to play small instruments loudly with a big tone, while those with (as Jacobs put it) "a short bow" enjoyed instruments with more efficient amplification in the instrument. Stated another way: A small tuba is not necessarily any more efficient than a big tuba at producing a given volume of sound, and old men might benefit from a particularly resonant big tuba. Of course, not all big tubas are resonant, and not all small tubas are unresonant.
Rick "who has experienced the full range of cardiovascular fitness as a tuba player" Denney
We talk in circles, but (again) "efficient" use of air sure is easier with a really well-developed and "efficiently-vibrating" pair of lips.
The less effective lips are at vibrating, the more air it's going to take to make them vibrate effectively (if indeed - they work well enough to vibrate effectively with any amount of air).
FatBastard:
I having been practicing much - over the past year (surgery that make it sorta hurt to pick up stuff and to breathe deeply/quickly)...and FatBastard (at first) was demanding a lot of me...but - over a period of weeks - it demanded less of me...I'm breathing SLIGHTLY more deeply SOMETIMES when playing it, but (mostly) my LIPS ("embouchure"...whatever) are - via working them - now nearer to peak efficiency (at least, "peak" for an old bloke).
Doc wrote: ↑Sat Jun 18, 2022 4:16 am
This place is a geographical oddity - two weeks from everywhere!
I stand corrected. Apparently we are talking in circles, and with a two week diameter.
(just waiting for it to come around again on the guitar...)
ps. as we are talking about circles, i had a college friend who rated folk on the following basis: if they were a circus, how many rings would they have? Always thought that was rather picturesque and flattering...
...showing that neither head-cocking - nor exaggerated back-arching - nor shoulder-raising - assist in taking in air...neither more efficiently nor more quickly.
