Playing clarinet hinges in being able to do one thing, breathe. You think it’d be easy right?! Well it might be….but learning to breathe well is crucial to advancing your technique.
Lets first talk about the type of breath you need to play the clarinet. The air you use needs to be fast and cold. Imagine someone gave you a twenty dollar bill and the only way you get to keep it is if you are able to keep it stuck to a vertical surface, without adhesive, without using your hands or touching the bill in anyway. You’d have to use your air. Strong, cold, and fast air! If you used warm air, like that to fog up a window, it would quickly fall to the floor! There goes your twenty dollars!
So how do we get this fast, cold air all the time when we’re playing? We exercise our lungs of course!
Just like our muscles, our lungs need exercise to be able to breathe in a manner that makes it easy and effective to play the clarinet. Air that is strong, fast, and cold will produce a clear, resonant tone. Air that is too warm will produce a breathy and unfocused tone.
Breathing Exercises
I love to teach breathing exercises to my students. It gives new students mouths a break since those muscles are still developing and it allows me to see how much work we need to do on breathing technique and breath support.
#1 – Counting
The easiest way to do a breathing exercise is by the counting method.
For example:
Breathe in for 4 beats (slow beats like 60bpm)
Hold the breath for 4 beats
Exhale out in a steady stream until the air is gone (at least the amount of time you took in the air)
Don’t just blow out the air in one quick rush. This doesn’t accurately resemble what you need to do while playing. If you’re finding it hard to get the concept of a strong, steady stream of air, try hissing, like a snake. This provides enough back pressure in the lungs to resemble playing.
Ok so In for 4, Hold for 4, Out for 4. Sounds simple right?
Now for the exercise part. Start adding time to the exercise
For Example
Breathe in for 8 beats
Hold for 4 beats
Exhale/Hiss out
Even better try:
Breathe in for 8 beats
Hold for 4 beats
Breath in again (do not exhale! this is on top of the air already in your lungs) for 4 more beats
Hold for 4 beats
Exhale/Hiss out
Breathing in on again, on top of air you already have in your lungs, requires the lungs to expand more and is a great way to extend the amount of air you can take in. This also helps indirectly for those times when you need to take in a large amount of air very quickly, by having your lungs ready and able to take in more air than they would on a normal breath.
Keep adding time to your “Ins” and “Holds” until the exercise becomes difficult or hard to maintain.
Personally I can do the below example a couple times before I become a bit light headed (which is normal don’t worry! Just don’t push it too hard after you start feeling like that.)
Breathe in for 12 beats
Hold for 8 beats
Breath in again for 6 more beats
Hold for 8 beats
Exhale/Hiss out
Breathing Tube Exercises
I want to credit my college clarinet instructor, Dunja @i_am_mrs_marcum, for this next one. I hated her at the time for it but, oh man, has this exercise been amazing for my breath support!
The breathing tube below works to exercise your lungs and breath support for a couple scientific reasons.
I need a new one. Poor thing has been loved to death, it’s finally cracked.
The main tube houses an ordinary ping pong ball. At the top of the main tube chamber are 3 holes of varying sizes and a smaller tube coming off the top to blow into. When you blow into the tube your air flows down into the chamber circling up and around. If your air is fast enough it creates enough air pressure to move the ping pong ball up to the top of the chamber. This is what you want!
Right out of the box it may seem easy to do, but that’s because all the holes at the top are open, start covering those up with tape or a sticker or something, something that you can move around, I used a clarinet mouthpiece patch.
First cover the big hole. Once you’ve mastered that start covering the other holes, either fully, or partially. Don’t cover all the holes completely, then you won’t be able to have any air escape to make it work.
The goal is to get the ping pong ball to stay up the entire time you’re blowing into the tube and sucking air out. The air should go pretty fast!
Now I know from experience that at first you won’t be able to do it for that long, so try and do it for 10 sec intervals to start, then start adding 10 seconds until you get up to a minute. At that point, whatever holes you have covered should feel kind of easy right? Then you start covering another hole, bit by bit, and repeat the processes over again.
Its not an easy exercises but I find it so helpful! Especially for woodwind players such as clarinet and flute, where the air is so important to the sound you’re producing.
Alright then! I hope that some of these breathing tips and tricks have given you some ideas on how to build up your breath support.
As always, aim high and keep practicing!
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