Forums — Teaching and Pedagogy
Breathing issues

Return to Forums Home | Return to Parent Topic — Teaching and Pedagogy

I have a student whose tongue restricts his ability to take a full breath because it partially blocks the wind pipe. He has been playing saxophone five years and when he takes a slow breath he can achieve about 20 seconds playing a long tone. But with quick breaths in the middle of a piece he can barely last 7 or 8 seconds. This is making it difficult to play full phrases. Has anyone had students with this issue? If so, do you have any recommendations on either exercises or techniques to improve this? Any help would be much appreciated! Dale Wolford School of Music & Dance San Jose State University email

Urge your student to take deep breaths; not shallow breathing. Even with rapidly moving pieces followed by immediate phrases occuring one after another, opportunities are presented to take deep breaths. Deeping breathing is also a matter of phrasing and interpretation; allowing your student to take ownership of those difficult pieces. Keith Gamble

[QUOTE=dalewolford;1065]I have a student whose tongue restricts his ability to take a full breath because it partially blocks the wind pipe. He has been playing saxophone five years and when he takes a slow breath he can achieve about 20 seconds playing a long tone. But with quick breaths in the middle of a piece he can barely last 7 or 8 seconds. This is making it difficult to play full phrases. Has anyone had students with this issue? If so, do you have any recommendations on either exercises or techniques to improve this? [/QUOTE] It sounds like what he needs to work on is replicating the way he breathes slowly, but at a much faster pace. This is what I would try: Get him to focus on what it feels like to take a full, deep breath, inhaling for 5 seconds (exact number of seconds don't really matter...whatever he is most comfortable with to start). Do that several times until he feels like he has a solid grasp of [B]exactly [/B]what it feels like. Then simply reduce the inhaling time by one second, again focusing on replicating the exact feeling he had before. Keep working down to 1 second very gradually. This is all assuming that he has simply built up a bad habit and doesn't have an actual medical condition/odd biological feature. Hope this helps! J. Wade Howles

Dale, does he make a lot of noise when he inhales, fast or slow?