Diaphragmatic breathing causes a lot of worry and confusion in a lot of singers.
Sometimes singers even get so bound up by trying to breathe correctly for singing, that their voice ends up getting riddled with bad habits.
Never fear though… with a few simple breathing techniques and concepts, things will become easy. Watch this singing lesson to get the full story.
When it comes down to it, attempting to learn proper breathing for singing in the beginning is going to do more bad then good.
The reason? For one, the proper breathing technique for singing is exactly the same is proper breathing in general.
If you sit there for a few moments and just pay attention to the way you breathe, you’ve just learned how to breathe when you sing!
There is one thing that can happen sometimes, which is taking “shallow” chest breaths.
If you’re singing and you breathe into your chest and you feel your stomach collapse, this is a problem.
The way to fix it is to just focus on making sure your chest and stomach expands when you take a breath… not collapses.
The real issue is rarely the breathing itself. If you feel like you’re not getting enough air to sing, it means that you’re doing something to cut off your air supply.
And this usually means you’re using your swallowing muscles in your singing process.
To fix this problem you will need completely different singing exercises as opposed to breathing exercises.
There is one little technique you can use if you find yourself running out of air in a long passage.
And that is to “push out” gently when you feel like you’re running out. This means you’ll feel your stomach and diaphragm move outwards nice and easily, and you’ll find that extra air to finish the vocal line.
In the end, unless you’re very advanced and singing a genre like musical theater or in a Broadway Play, you won’t need to focus too much attention on learning diaphragmatic breathing.
The more important things to do are work at getting your swallowing muscles to sit still when you sing, and allowing your full tone to come through.