“Spare the breath and spoil the tone”
Walter Bergmann’s pithy aphorisms about recorder playing result from years spent working with amateur recorder players; observing their habits. While some may sound a little facetious, they all contain at least a nugget of truth. Today’s blog is inspired by the golden rule quoted above - one I often repeat to the musicians I work with. Let’s explore the reasons why…
Which element of technique do you pay most attention to when playing? I bet there are many occasions when you get tied up with fast fingerwork, or moments when you feel you’re wrestling with some sort of tongue twister. But what happens to your tone while this battle is going on? Almost certainly it suffers as you struggle to multitask. In this second chapter of The Technique Zone my mission is to help you understand how to work on your sound - hopefully to the point where you develop good habits which will hold, no matter how fast the notes are
Setting good foundations
In part one of The Technique Zone I talked about the importance of good posture when playing. Hopefully you’ve been thinking about this in recent weeks but if you’d like a refresher you can find that blog post here.
The next step is to get you breathing efficiently. Breath is as vital for a good recorder tone as it is for life itself, so it’s worth taking a moment to consider exactly how our lungs work. Breathing is such an instinctive act - our bodies just get on with it and it’s often only when things go wrong that we become aware of it.
Understanding the way we breathe
The most important tool for breathing is your diaphragm - a parachute shaped muscle which sits beneath your lungs, separating them from your digestive system. Like your heart, it does its job without conscious direction from your brain. This is vital or there’s a danger we’d forget to breathe if something more exciting distracted us!
So what does your diaphragm actually do? Fundamentally, it pulls downwards, expanding your lungs and creating a vacuum in them. This vacuum pulls air in from the atmosphere via your windpipe, filling your lungs and providing oxygen to your brain - breathing in. When it’s time to exhale your diaphragm relaxes, pushing the waste products (carbon dioxide) and any unused breathe out of your lungs. All this happens between 12 and 20 times a minute at rest without us even thinking! There are other muscles in your rib cage (your intercostal muscles) which hep this process, but for the purposes of recorder playing it’s the diaphragm that’s the main focus of our attention. If you want to learn more about how your lungs work I can recommend this article from the British Lung Foundation which explains the complete process of breathing very clearly.
Learn to breathe efficiently
If you’re going to make the best possible tone with your recorder there’s one thing you need lots of - breath! We take our breathing for granted 99% of the time and it’s something we only really consider when under stress - perhaps when running for the bus or working out at the gym. At these moments our bodies need more oxygen so our breathing mechanism instinctively works harder, using the spare lung capacity which goes unused most of the time.
If you’re to play with a beautiful tone you need to learn to utilise this spare capacity at will, really filling your lungs so allow for long, controlled musical phrases. The first step is to learn to inhale in a relaxed, open manner, really filling your lungs with air.
The starting point is to be as relaxed as possible, especially around your abdomen. Take a few deep breaths in and as you do so imagine the air travelling right to the bottom of your lungs. To do this your stomach muscles need to be relaxed and soft - don’t try to hold your stomach muscles in to look thinner while you’re doing this. Allow your stomach and the soft tissue in your sides and back to expand as you inhale and your diaphragm pulls downwards, compressing the contents of your abdomen. When you exhale, do so in a completely relaxed way - just let the air go with no attempt to control its flow.
It’s no bad idea to spend a minute or two doing this before you play each day so the feeling of really filling your lungs becomes natural and instinctive. This is of course the way you breathe when you’re asleep and you’re completely relaxed.
How to take active control of your diaphragm
If the diaphragm is an involuntary muscle how can we control it to help our recorder playing? Although you can’t directly feel your diaphragm, it is possible to give it a helping hand by using your stomach muscles. We’ll begin by using these muscles in an extreme way and the gradually take control over the exhalation of breath.
Take a deep, open relaxed breath and this time strongly squeeze your tummy muscles to push the air out of your lungs really quickly. Imagine blowing out lots of candles on a birthday cake, trying to make sure none of them are left flickering. When you do this, the pressure from your stomach muscles pushes on the diaphragm, squeezing the air out of your lungs.
As you get used to this, gradually reduce the strength of contraction in your stomach muscles so you still exhale quickly but in a more controlled manner. This is still too violent for recorder playing, but it’s part of the process of taking control of your breathing.
Finally, instead of tensing up your stomach muscles strongly, make it a gradual squeeze, noting how you can vary the speed of the air leaving your mouth with these abdominal muscles. This is where you want to be for playing the recorder. You’re now controlling the flow of air using these powerful muscles rather than creating tension in your chest, shoulders and neck. In the following video clip I demonstrate this technique.
Do you look happy as you play?
Even if recorder playing is an absolute joy for you (and why wouldn’t it be?!), you should always aim to look sulky and a little depressed! When you smile you engage lots of small muscles around your face and throat, creating tension - try smiling right now and note the way your face muscles tense up.
Now take a breath and sigh heavily, consciously relaxing your lips, cheeks and throat. This is the feeling you want while playing the recorder as any tension in your windway will have an adverse effect on your tone. Try yawning too, and notice how this opens up and relaxes your throat.
Unlike all other wind instruments, there is no embouchure required for the recorder - the act of forming your lips around or against a mouthpiece. Instead you should aim to keep your lips and throat as relaxed as possible - no real effort is needed to seal the lips around the beak of the instrument. If you don’t believe me, try actively tensing up your face and throat and notice the effect this constriction has on your tone!
Putting these new skills into practice
Now you know how to breath well, let’s grab a recorder and use these new skills to play.
Pick a recorder (perhaps a treble or tenor for starters) and try some of the exercises in the following video. Take some time to explore the extremes of your sound - from really weedy to overblown and violent. Don’t worry about disturbing your neighbours!
Play notes in different parts of the instrument’s range and notice the way they demand different levels of breath. Low notes need gentle breath or they split easily - for these note you need to squeeze your stomach muscles very gently.
In contrast, your breath needs to be moving faster for the highest notes - a firmer squeeze from those abdominal muscles. Thinking about these differences in terms of speed of air rather than being loud or quiet can be really helpful. To get a better sense of this, blow gently on your hand (slow moving breath) and notice how the air is warm, as it has time to pick up heat from your body before it leaves your mouth. Now engage your stomach muscles more firmly to move the breath quickly. As it touches your hand the breath now feels cold. This is because the air has less contact time with your blood vessels and doesn’t pick up body heat. You may find it helpful to think of low notes as requiring warm air, while high notes demand cooler air.
How to develop your tone through practice
As with any new skill, it’s best to practise some simple exercises at first, so you’re able to give them your full attention. In time these techniques become habitual and you’ll need to think about them less while working on other things. Here are a few simple exercises to develop your tone.
Long notes. Ok, long notes aren’t the most exciting thing to practise, but they do give you lots time to think! Spend a few minutes at the start of each practice session playing long notes in different parts of the recorder’s range. With each one, aim to find the ideal speed of air to make a full, beautiful tone - slower air for the low notes, faster air for the high ones. Really listen to your sound (close your eyes - you’ll notice more!) and take care to keep the pitch of each note the same from beginning to end - don’t let them sag as you lungs begin to empty. As you feel you’re running out of breath, engage those stomach muscles a little more and you may be surprised at the untapped reserves of air remaining in your lungs.
Slow scales. Pick a really simple scale (no more than one sharp or flat) and play it really slowly - perhaps four steady beats on each note. As you rise up through the scale, you’ll need to gradually increase the speed of your breath to make the optimum sound. When you run out of breath, stop to breathe in deeply and restart on the same note you just finished. As you do this, listen carefully to see if your tone improves when you restart. If it does, that’s because you’d stopped blowing as efficiently as your lungs emptied. Instead, try to ensure the tone matches so you can be sure you’re always making the best possible sound.
Five or ten minutes spent every day on these two simple exercises will have a dramatic effect on your tone - as long as you really think about what you’re doing and listen critically to what your hear.
The techniques I’ve covered here won’t make you a whizzy, virtuosic recorder player, but you’ll definitely sound better. Fast fingers and nippy tonguing can come later, but if there’s one thing I’m always imploring of musicians I work with it’s to play with a genuinely beautiful tone.
When Walter Bergmann said, “Spare the breath and spoil the tone” he was absolutely right. Blowing inefficiently will create a weedy, undernourished tone which doesn’t make good use of the your instrument’s design. If you want just one thing to focus on every time you play, you simply can’t go wrong by concentrating on breathing and blowing more efficiently. I often say to groups I work with that few things in recorder playing can’t be improved by using more air and I suspect I’ll be saying that until I retire!
Now it’s your turn to do some homework…
If my words here have inspired you to work on your tone here’s a simple task for you. Pick a simple melody to learn, then record yourself playing it. If you own a smartphone the built in voice memo app will do the job just fine. If you’re not sure what tune to choose, why not try this one by Jacob Van Eyck:
Next, spend a few minutes each day working on the exercises I talked about earlier - deep breathing and controlled blowing, long notes and slow scales. Ten minutes will be enough to make a difference. Maybe think of it as the recorder playing equivalent of cleaning your teeth - one off those short tasks you carry out without fail every day!
In six weeks time, record yourself again playing the same tune and compare the two. I’m sure you’ll notice a difference and by this stage the techniques you’re using will be more habitual, freeing you up to concentrate on other aspects of your playing.
Do leave a comment below if you’re planning to try this (there’s nothing like promising something in public to make you feel more accountable!) and I’d love it if you could report back in a few weeks and let us know how you’re getting on. Why not join me in my mission to make the recorder soundworld a more beautiful place!