Tuba Breathing Techniques

Video Transcript

Hi there, Kevin Smith again, Mr. TubaLove. I'm talking to you today about breathing in relation to making music on the tuba. Really in short, breathing is everything. This is a wind instrument. It requires wind. Because it's a big wind instrument, it requires a lot of wind. And if you had just seen my clip on embouchure, you would have seen also how I as someone who never was trained properly from the get go, also never was taught how to breathe properly in playing the instrument. A lot of when people are talking sometimes we tend to just talk from up in the neck, and don't tend to breathe very deeply at all. But when you're playing an instrument or singing you're looking for what's called diaphragmatic breathing out of your diaphragm. This area right here. And to create an analogy what you want is your diaphragm to be like a balloon. You take a deep breath. Your diaphragm swells up like a balloon, and as you expel the air out your diaphragm is going to just slowly get smaller as the air passage comes out. Now some people would be inclined to think, "Well, I'm playing softer, I don't need to play I don't, excuse me, I don't need to take as deep a breath to play softly." Wrong. To play softly on a big instrument like this is in many ways more difficult than playing loud. So, no matter if you're playing real loud or real soft, take nice deep breaths, especially for the softer playing. You give that air stream that support that you need to keep your sound nice and steady. So remember, big balloon down here. Diaphragmatic breathing.

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