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From: Hunterha~OL.COM
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1996 07:30:36 -0500
Subject: Breathing exercises

Recent posts to the list have requested breathing exercises. Three that have
worked well for me are described below.

1) The purpose of this exercise is to give the player a "feel" for proper --
i.e. diaphragmatic -- breathing. It's sometimes difficult for players to
recognise and distinguish between chest and diaphragmatic breathing. This
exercise will introduce the player to the physical sensation of breathing
from the diaphragm.

Stand straight up with arms at sides. Slowly raise yourself on tiptoe,
breathing in, and raise your arms over your head. Remain on tiptoe for a
moment with arms raised overhead, then slowly lower your arms to your sides
while breathing out. Notice the feeling in your gut during this exercise;
that feeling is your diaphragm working.

Diaphragmatic breathing is important to sustaining an even tone for the
longest possible period of time, and also makes a player's tone "big" and
resonant even at very low volumes. It's the basic breathing technique for
most musical situations.

The next two exercises are designed to give the player control over the tone
of sustained notes. They require diaphragmatic breathing.

2) Hold a note -- any note, inhale or exhale -- absolutely steady at medium
volume for as long as possible. 15 seconds is a good minimum to shoot for.

3) Take any note, inhale or exhale. Start the note at the lowest possible
volume. Gradually increase the volume to the highest volume you can manage.
Lower the volume to the starting volume gradually, at the same rate you used
to increase the volume, so the overall "curve" of the volume is a gradual
ramp from minimum up to maximum and down to minimum again.

The latter two exercises were taught to me by a saxophone teacher over twenty
years ago, and have been very useful to me since then. I return to them
whenever I find my tone sounding thin or wobbly, and they never fail to fix
the problem. I hope others find them as useful.

Richard Hunter