Breath, Pressure & Flow. Dos & don'ts of breathing for singers - balancing a voice for sound & style

Dr Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher on misunderstandings, misconceptions and personal insights about breathing and breath management for singing. Untrue statements, pressed phonation, relentless twang, breathy versus leaky tone, everything is up for discussion. Plus five areas where we can control breathing, and details on using two contrasting airstreams at the same time (introducing the "Granny Kiss"...
With research from Ian Howell and Heidi Moss Erickson on back pressure and brain function (used with permission)

00:00:00 Breathe Out To Sing
Personal insights on the misunderstood aspects of breath in vocal training

00:03:31 Misconceptions About Breathing in Singing
Discussing common misunderstandings and clarifying the role of breath in vocal technique

00:07:20 Different names for Breath and Breath Management 
Why a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work

00:09:47 Vocal Fold Dynamics and Airflow 
Understanding the relationship between vocal folds, airflow, and sound production

00:13:30 You must never... Jeremy gets annoyed
When people try to explain something but make it worse

00:18:37 The Artistry of Vocal Timbre and Dynamics 
The importance of varied vocal timbres and dynamics in expressive singing

00:21:00 Calibration and Personalization in Vocal Technique 
Tailoring breath, pressure, and flow techniques to individual singers and styles

00:23:42 A clear definition of "back pressure"
Dr Ian Howell's take on back pressure and flow resistance

00:28:16 Singing as predictive behaviour
Heidi Moss Erickson on singing in the brain

00:32:25 Calibrating your breathing 
Ideas and techniques for calibrating breathing as an experienced singer and as a beginner

You can find out about our Teacher Pathway for singing teachers, vocal coaches and choir leaders here 
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Heidi Moss Erickson's article "A Copernican Shift: Reframing How We Think About Breathing" is downloadable here 
https://www.heidimosserickson.com/writings

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Transcript

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This Is A Voice, Season 9 Episode 2: Breath, Pressure and Flow

This is a Voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.

Hello and welcome to This is a Voice, Season 9, Episode 2. The podcast where we get vocal about voice. I'm Jeremy Fisher. And I'm Dr. Gillyanne Kayes. What's the topic today, Gillyanne? Breathe out to sing, said the singing teacher. Meaning? Well, a little bit of a personal share to start us off. When I was training as a classical singer, this was something that my singing teacher used to say to me, breathe out to sing.

And yes, of course, it's pretty obvious because mostly certainly in mainstream western lyric music, we're going to be singing on the out breath. But somehow I never really understood it because I'd take a breath in to sing something extended like, for instance, Schubert's Nacht und Träume, But it was never the right kind of breath.

Oh no, you can't take a breath like that. No, I'd open my mouth and I wouldn't even have sung a note and it was no wrong kind of breath. So bless her, I learned loads and loads from that singing teacher and she certainly taught me to sing a phrase and set up my resonance beautifully. But in terms of breathing I was left none the wiser.

And to be honest, it's why in a way today what I want to talk about is not just breath management, breath use, but pressure and flow. Yeah, flow is to do with, breath and pressure is to do with the air forces and what's going on in the system. And I think sometimes the pressure aspect is misunderstood and left out of singing training.

Yes, there's some very interesting things been said about pressure in singing. We had a long discussion with some of our people only a few days ago about Breathing and Pressure and Flow. It was the Teacher Pathway live seminar that we did, where people come in and they ask questions about anything.

So we said, let's focus on breath. And in a way, this is what sparked this podcast off, because it was such a fascinating conversation. And there are misconceptions and misunderstandings about breath, what it is, how you use it, how you don't use it, where it comes from, how you hold it. how you feed it, there's all sorts of things.

Yeah, plus, you know, we have these scientific concepts about pressure and flow, and it's about understanding how we purpose those, in singing lessons if we're going to do it at all. But before we go there, apparently we're very much of the moment. Jeremy, do you want to just quote a little bit from Patsy Rodenburg's statement on leaving the Guildhall?

Patsy Rodenburg, Patsy Patsy Rodenburg very recently left the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and she had been there as a professor for, I think, nearly 40 years. And she said, 

it became very clear to me that the people who were supposedly teaching voice and movement don't know what they're doing. You can't teach voice unless you teach breath. And do you know what? That's where I went with my first edition of Singing in the Actor. Yeah, really interesting. Had to be in there, really important. So Okay, so why? Why is breath important for vocalising? Oh, can we do some these are some of the, true and false.

True or false? Some insist that the abdomen must never move during the expiratory phrase, phase. In fact, I was taught that by one of my singing teachers, not the one I'm referring to now. True or false? Interesting one. Hey, . Okay. Others teach active use of the abdominal wall during expiration. True or false?

Some do what Hixon calls belly out during the expiratory phase. True or false? Others insist the belly should be firm and the rib cage does the work. Okay. Which of those statements are the real ones about breathing? And the answer is all of them and none of them. Yeah, because. One size doesn't fit all.

Any or all, that's so important. And before we get on to talking about the sort of the pressure system and the relationship of that to breath. Yes. Can I quote something from one of the people who is on our current Teacher Accreditation Cohort. She's actually a speech and language therapist as well as a singing teacher and singer.

Special mention to pressure and flow. We have a whole training session on this. In fact, I think we had two this year. I've never had any explicit training like this about breathing and support. Ooh, there's the S word as well. To be able to understand clearly and simply how it works and what the voice requires to work efficiently has been so helpful in my teaching and voice therapy.

Yay! Especially in SOVT exercises, which I spend the majority of my time doing. A bit more about SOVTE later podcast. Yes, S O V T E. Yeah so as Jeremy said, One size doesn't fit all. Okay, let's just break that down. Why doesn't one size fit all? Why can you not learn a breathing technique and then use it throughout your life on every genre you can think of?

Why not? Because you can't. Well, because it doesn't work, it doesn't work? It simply doesn't work. Straightforward as that. When I first started learning how to make a decent sort of chest voice sound for musical theater and I was working with my musical theater singers, people who were doing things like Miss Saigon and, they would come in and they, they have perhaps learned a more you know, western lyric type training, using large airflow amounts for singing.

And then suddenly they were having to sing something like the Movie In My Mind, and they were using these, high airflow rates With the sort of the higher subglottal pressure that's required for that kind of music. And these young women were killing themselves, because, they could do it and make a whole load of noise, and they were getting vocally tired.

And that was when the penny began to drop for me that I began to realize, actually, you need, and Hixon did the work on this, he said that when people were singing, I mean he looked at country and western styles, that their sort of lung volumes were much more similar to what we use in speaking voice.

And that was a real, Game changer for me, realizing that what was happening at vocal fold level, I didn't even know the word subglottal pressure in those days full disclosure, but what was happening at vocal fold level was a player in how we use our breath and how we manage our breath. The whole thing is a dynamic system.

So, I mean, you've got a list here just in front of us of the sort of wordology that's used in singing training. And I came to a similar, but different list completely on my own from the experience of coaching across genres and coaching different people, different styles. And you different voices, different sexes, I mean, all sorts of things.

So if we read this list out, which is really fascinating. Yeah, and so it's word ology that's used in singing and voice research. Lung pressure and lung volumes. Subglottal pressure, supraglottal pressure. Yes. Phonation threshold pressure. Yep. Intraoral pressure. And of course there's more in beatboxing, I think we can have intralabial pressure, isn't that right?

I have no idea. Okay. Oh thank you, that's so kind. Yeah, lovely. We wrote about this in This is a Voice, didn't we? It was actually, it was a real eye opener. Well the fact that, in terms of the airflow systems and the pressure. The fact that in beatboxing you use quite a lot of non pulmonic air. So the air isn't coming through your lungs.

The vocal folds are closed so that the pressure is actually coming from the mouth and it's your tongue mostly that's using force to push the air out. So you're using pulmonic air for vowels and non pulmonic air for sounds. It's really fascinating. And did I not then just Oh, and by the way, that's there you can do ingressive non pulmonic, ingressive pulmonic air.

non pulmonic and ingressive pulmonic as well. So it's four different airflies, air supplies. I believe this is what we call the granny kiss. Is that right?

That's both at the same time. Okay, right. Well, both him and me at the same time. And then plus, Can I just digress for a moment? I was not allowed to use the term granny kiss in the book. To me, it's Absolutely descriptive, but I'm probably being really evil using it. But it is hilarious because when you are doing that, you are making pulmonic air down the nose, so it's flowing outwards for the and then non pulmonic air inwards for the lips, because that's an inward kiss. So you end up with, which is airflow flowing in two directions. Interesting. Okay. I'm an unofficial granny anyway, because I'm a great aunt now, so therefore it's allowed. Plus here's an acronym, MEAD. Myoelastic Aerodynamic.

So what we've got going on are the elastic forces of the, that the muscular forces of the vocal folds coming together, and also that swing together, swing apart. That's my understanding of what's involved in myoelastic. And then also aerodynamic. And all of this is going on when the glottis is closing and opening.

We're sending out those little puffs of air. We're managing our breath as we go out in the length of the note, the phrase, the volume, etc., etc. Plus there is air mass in the vocal tract already. And I think We don't know enough about what those forces are doing, above the glottis during the out breath phase, when we're vocalizing.

We can hear the effects of that though. It's one of the things that I'm really interested in when I'm working with singers, and I'll go, that vowel shape is wrong for the sound you want to make for instance. And I'm doing that partly by instinct, partly by experience, partly by, I I'm estimating the type of sound that you want to make, but I have enough knowledge of genre and physiology and physicality and all that stuff.

But what's so interesting is that quite often somebody will be wanting to create a sound and I'm going tongue is not in the right place for that. And therefore it's giving too it's, well, in my language, it's giving too much back pressure. And therefore you're working way too hard with your vocal folds because of it, but it's not the vocal folds that are causing the problem.

It's the tongue position. And this is all about cause and effect as well. Just by the way, which is another hobby horse of mine. If you're going to change something, if you're going to coach somebody, you need to find out what the cause is because you can hear the effects of it, but tackling just the effect is not going to change the cause.

Absolutely. And that's what I mean, again later on, we're going to talk more about the notion of back pressure and what people think it means. And also about calibration, because what you're talking about, Jeremy is you're calibrating something within that particular singer for that set of sounds.

100%. Yeah. Oh, and can I just go to my list, which I thought was the, we've just done the wordology list, lung pressure, subglottal, supraglottal, phonation threshold pressure, all of that. I came at it from a slightly different angle, which was what's happening when we sing. And I worked out that there are at least four, if not five places that we can control airflow.

And I put it on a diagram and we showed it to cohort 23 and they went, Oh, in fact, we showed it to cohort 22 and cohort 22 went, Ooh, can I use that? Can we have that in a studio? So really interesting. I will actually, I'm going to write an article about it and put the diagram up, but essentially.

We can control the airflow from the bottom of the container. You can't really control diaphragm, but you can control all the muscles around it. Then there's lung volume, so you're controlling with ribcage. Then there's false vocal folds, so controlling there. There's true vocal folds, you're controlling there.

And then there's tongue cavity spaces moving all about, and you can control there as well. And it's really interesting. Oh, and by the way, we haven't actually talked air speed yet. May I tweak? You may. You can adjust there as well. I'm not sure we could say we could control from higher up, but. Oh, I think you can.

Unless we're using SOVTE. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's see what people say. Yes. No, I think you can control from any one of those places because it's like, because I can demonstrate it. It's one of those, because I've experienced it and I go, Oh, that's what I'm doing. So One of the things I love doing is going, is this possible?

Can it be done like this? Or am I doing something and thinking it's something else? Let's break it down. Let's try it out. Let's experiment. Let's do all sorts of things. I have to say to our listeners that if you're new, there are two words that are like a red rag to a ball with my other half. One is You must never.

Oh, don't ever, don't ever say that to me. You must always. You tell Jeremy that then he, I'm sure this is your neurodivergence. He will immediately demonstrate that in fact, there is another way. Yeah. The thing is, I love, this is going to sound really weird. I love corners. I mean, actually, genuinely in life, I love corners as well, but I love corners because a corner tells you if something is a real statement or not.

Because if I can find a corner where it isn't, then I'm going, then it isn't a real statement. It might be a generalization. It might be an explanation, a sort of very, it might be typical, simple speak explanation of something that's much more complicated, but don't tell me it's a never or an always. Cause it ain't.

So now you know what life is like here. Yeah. I want to go on to just refer to a recent Instagram video that actually one of our registered teachers sent where the the singer, the singing teacher seemed to be insisting that the vocal folds are closed during phonation, demoing this by showing that the candle flame does not flicker.

Okay. So, and I understand that this person was trying to clear something up about maybe overuse of breath and so forth, but it is a misunderstanding. The vocal folds do indeed close during phonation. Briefly. But only the movement of the air and those air mass forces will allow them to sustain vibration.

Do you remember we mentioned MEAD? Yes. And the muscles of the vocal folds can close the glottis, of course, but they're not able to do even 220 times a second. So the trick with the candle, it was rather neat. I was thinking, Jeremy, that it works because the amount of airflow arriving at the lips is relatively small and therefore insufficient to make the flame move.

Yeah. To be fair, I haven't shown this to you. No, you haven't, but I mean the whole, okay. I have an issue when somebody tries to explain something in simpler terms and it just makes it more complicated. I mean, you should have seen all the comments, which is like, whoa, this is amazing, this is changing my life, etc.

And it's, I have to say, it does relate to that mysterious breathe out to sing thing, because I would breathe out, but apparently that wasn't right. Okay. Okay. Let's talk about that whole candle and breath thing. You can breathe onto a candle, and if your air speed is slow enough, it's not going to move.

So, this is partly about air speed, it's partly about air amount. And it must be about the surrounding air, too. True. What's so interesting about this is that it is a, it's a conglomeration of two entirely different things. One is about air speed, air flow, and the other is about clarity of sound. So this is the other thing is that if you're doing a clear sound, you are less likely to move the candle.

If you're doing a breathy sound, you are more likely to move the candle. These are not givens, you could still do it and not move a thing. Or you could do a really clear sound and still move it. They're not absolutes. But what's so interesting about this is, in an attempt to get people, I'm assuming, to do a clearer sound with a lower airflow, because that would make sense to me.

They're coming out with a statement that isn't actually true. It isn't real. It isn't true. It isn't accurate. So if that's a belief Made a lovely reel. Yeah, of course it does. I mean, actually, quite a lot of reels contain great things to look at, but aren't necessarily true. What's good about it, if you like, is if people go away and go, Oh, I can control my airflow and therefore I won't blow the candle out.

And hey, listen, I'm getting a clearer sound. Fantastic. Love that because it's a practical thing to do. But don't tell me that the vocal folds are the vocal folds are and remain closed during phonation because they don't. Do you know what would be a so much better way of using a tool like that, like a candle, which it would be to take get someone to sing a note and move the flame.

and then see if they can actually change that during phonation. So they make the flame move, and then it's like, okay, now carry on singing, but you need to make the flame stand still. That would be quite an interesting thing. I think, I mean, and again, I'd give it more parameters. So I'd say keep the volume the same and move and then not move the candle flame.

Keep the air. flow the same, but increase and decrease volume. Can you make it breathier? Can you make it clearer? I mean, it's like, there are things that you can do, which is a whole experimentation thing. And then you discover a sound or a setup that works for you. But again, even then, One size doesn't fit all.

So congratulations for sound, for finding a clear sound. Now can we do variations on it? Can you find breathy sounds that are going to work in your genre? Can you find leaky sounds that are going to work in your genre and that are healthy for you and your voice? This, to me, it's like, I love that people want to make specific sounds.

Congratulations to you because it's part of your palette. It's part of your artist's palette. But for heaven's sake, can we not forget the artistry? Because people are only interesting to listen to when they have artistry of some kind and we have some variation. I mean, even in terms of communication, when you have variation, I can understand you better.

I was interestingly listening to a very famous Broadway singer yesterday, singing a piece that I love and know backwards, and because it was relentless twang, at the same volume all the way through, I literally could not hear what she was saying, because there was no variation, there was no light and shade, and there was no meaning.

And then it becomes inexpressive, doesn't it? Oh, it drives me nuts. Because changing a vocal timbre, changing a voice quality is one of the ways that we indicate emotional response. Totally. And we're talking subtle, you don't have to drop out entirely from your vocal setup if you don't want to.

But the idea that the goal is to produce exactly the same volume and exactly the same sound quality in every single syllable is a nonsense goal, because it doesn't make any sense. Well, and also if you're trying to produce, if you're very obsessed with flow, and I can understand reasons why people might be, I mean, there's psychological flow as well, isn't there?

There's flow in performance, which is another thing altogether. But, If you're trying to achieve the same flow all the time, and you have interruption of consonants, and so forth, or suddenly you're singing on an M or an N, which is a type of SOVT. I used to have terrible trouble with those sounds, because I was trying to breathe out to sing at the same rate all the time.

I wonder why my voice seized up. Um. Changes of pitch. Yeah. Changes of pitch. Absolutely. Vocal fold vibrations at different speeds need different air flows. Absolutely. So, it's. And just because you're singing with a looser closure doesn't mean what you're doing is wrong. If you're singing with a firmer closure, that also doesn't mean what you're doing is wrong.

It's all about calibrating within the system. It is all about calibrating and I want to go there. Okay. What is so fascinating in during the teacher pathway video live session that we did one of the teachers talking about a student of theirs who has a very breathy voice. Oh, yes. And it was really interesting because we were talking about breath flow, we were talking about air speed as well, which to me are two different things.

Air speed has a sort of generative power behind it, whereas air flow is how much is coming out. Two different things. So one of the things we are Asked her was what type of breathy? Yes. Because this is one type of breathy, which I think is not harmful and which is just a less firm closure. Yep. But if I'm speaking like this and I'm actually aiming for volume and you're getting quite a lot of push in the air, actually that's quite exciting.

It's going to indicate excitement but it might not be a comfortable thing to do over time. So we expect. explored that, didn't we? And then we came up with solutions for again, calibration. And likewise, and I think, I don't know whether people's hearing is changing at the moment in the UK.

Mine is. The thing that I hear the most is pressed phonation in musical theatre. I hear people doing, it's thick folds, it's twang, I've got to keep this. And so what you hear is a sound that is rigid. I think what you hear is something that there's a sense of it being driven and and we say this in the context of, a measurable pressed phonation isn't necessarily a bad thing.

But what we can lose is some harmonic information. And I, and this is what you mean, I think, Jeremy, isn't it, about hearing. I think that harmonic information is one of the things that is exciting and moving for the listener. Totally. Or we could do a whole, I think we need a guest to talk about this.

Moving on. Well, listen, let's talk about back pressure and I'm going to share some information that comes from a very interesting post by Dr Ian Howell on his personal Facebook. Ian, I just want to say thank you for all of your provoking or thought provoking posts, which I think generates some really interesting discussion from the people who interact with you.

So I'm going to quote directly. I've been thinking about terms for teaching and discussing SOVTE SOVT exercises, and I'm curious what back pressure actually conjures in your minds. The definition of back pressure is flow resistance, which changes the way that the air mass in the vocal tract can accept new air.

Not something that returns from the vocal tract back to the vocal folds. But I frequently see these ideas conflated. There are absolutely traveling pressure patterns that move forward and backward in the vocal tract, and these things all happen at the same time, but these are not technically the same thing.

I get that we use simple language to try and get ideas out into the world, But I wonder if this is an example of simplifying away the underlying principle. And he finished by saying, who uses the term backpressure? Me. Yeah, we do. We definitely do. And lots of people did. And it was such a fascinating discussion.

So, if you do know Ian's um, uh, Facebook, and you are a follower of him, check into that. It's a really brilliant discussion. Can I say that I hadn't seen that quote until just before we started recording and I read that and I went, wow, okay. And of course he's correct. And it's going to be really interesting because the thing that I loved the most was the description that said, the air mass in the vocal tract, it changes the way the air mass in the vocal tract can accept new air.

And I went, Oh, I love that. I presume by that, Ian means from underneath, underneath, although he hasn't specified it. But that's so interesting because essentially it's like, I've always had a problem with the idea that airflow comes straight out. It comes from the lungs, it comes through the vocal folds, and it just comes straight out.

And of course it doesn't. And also because we have such a flexible mechanism above the vocal folds where you can move pretty much everything in that mechanism except the hard palate It means that the shapes are constantly changing. So there's going to be some disturbance somewhere. And I love the idea that the, that the airflow coming up doesn't have a space to come out or meets resistance, if you like.

I loved that. It was such a, it was such a, My mental image changes from that sentence and I love it when that happens. And I think we know quite a lot about how that impacts on resonance because masses of work has been done on that. But in terms of airflow dynamics, I think this is still quite An important area for research.

In other words, not just with SOVTE, but what's happening above the vocal folds with those air masses. It makes sense to me practically because we do a lot of work with classical singers wanting to sing musical theatre and contemporary commercial, and therefore they already have a technique that works for them in their classical world.

And the thing, particularly with the women, the men less so, they seem to have an easier time of this, but with the women it's We spend a lot of time going, the shape that you're holding, which is your standard resonating space, and you don't even realize that it's your standard resonating space, is not a resonating space that can work when you change vocal fold texture.

And therefore we're going to change, because Sorry, Ian, the back pressure is too high. Because the tongue position or the pharynx position that you're holding doesn't, and I'm going to go with this now, doesn't allow the appropriate amount of air to come into the space. Interesting. And actually on Sunday when we do our pedagogy practicum we're going to be exploring exactly that.

So that'll be fun. I would like to move to some of the things that Heidi Moss pointed us to when she engaged with this post because we, we started to have a lot of interesting discussion about what's going on in the the laryngeal motor cortex when we are phonating, both in singing and speaking.

And I was saying, okay, but what's the relationship between and, maintaining homeostasis. And of course Heidi is wonderful and came up with a whole load of stuff and diagrams that I have yet to digest. But I think what I'd like to do is talk about and actually quote from an article that she wrote for Journal of Singing, a Copernican Shift, reframing how we Think About Breath in Singing.

And thank you very much for this enlightening article, Heidi. The decisions aren't made by a few large muscles triggering the process. but rather the microcoordination of a hundred muscles in the brain signaling to act in concert, generating the wondrous outcome of sound. And I love this in particular.

Singing is a predictive behavior. The complex mechanism is orchestrated by the brain's calculations and predictions operating behind the scenes. The brain decides what motor elements to coordinate for a specific sound well before the sound is executed.

Now the thing is, how do we do that? How do we elicit that predictive behavior so that it's going to work for our student if they're an inexperienced singer or if they're learning a new piece? or if we're sight reading, which we also talked about the other day, didn't we, in the pathway seminar. And if they have a belief about breathing, if they've got a one size fits all idea, how do we elicit that predictive behavior?

I thought that was a very interesting comment. And I agree with it. And I also had a reservation about it. So Heidi, if you're listening, the reservation that I had is, exactly what Gillyanne's just been talking about. And it was ironically what we were talking about in the teacher pathway live seminar, which is when you have experience of singing, your brain just lines that up essentially.

The difficulty is when you don't have experience of singing and that's why so many beginners don't map their breathing properly. They run out of breath or they don't map the sound or whatever because they don't have the physiological experience of making those sounds or singing a phrase like that or expanding breathing or singing through to the end of the phrase.

And this is all about, I mean, and again, on a hobby horse now, this is what practice is about. It's actually building that memory, it's building that pathway, it's building that set of coordinated instructions, and to be able to be repeatable. And also transferable, which is something else as well. So if you learn to sing a long phrase, you can then in theory transfer that setup, that, that mental list of instructions into a different long phrase, even into a different genre.

Yeah. And it might be that the the pulse of the music is slightly different. Yeah. Or, it might be that the rhythmic structure is slightly different, maybe one is in, I don't know, 4 4, and the other one is in 12 8, and that would make quite a difference, I think, you're very good on things like rhythm and pulse.

And that may well change how you approach the phrase. Yes. And I think it's important as, as teachers that we allow our students to explore and experience what that musical pattern is about repeatedly in different ways. And there are lots there are lots of ways we can do that where we might perhaps refer to that at the end of this podcast, but I can see you've landed on something else that Heidi said.

So do you want to quote from it? This is the same article, people. Immediately prior to the onset of vocalization, once all the motor variables have been calculated for the task, the depth of inhalation is adjusted to the anticipated length of the vocalization, not the other way around. And I actually love that sentence because what she's saying is once you've got those, that sort of experience of how things work in your body, in your brain, then all of those motor variables are decided before you start singing, and therefore you take in the appropriate amount of breath as you have measured it for the phrase that's coming up.

And it's, just speaking for myself, because I don't do a lot of physical singing now, that if I pick up something that I learned a long time ago, sometimes what will happen is I won't take in enough because I haven't calibrated, or I'll take in too much, or what I might find is that I'm okay, for the first four phrases, but because I've got another 16 phrases to go in that section of the song, I actually haven't mapped what I need to do across the length of that song section.

That's a really good point because, sometimes it's very easy to sing a phrase out of context and you can do that very well. As a teacher, you'll spend a lot of time doing that and you've got to remember what's going on in the rest of the song. And again, From experience coaching, so often people get to the end of the song and they go, I don't have enough breath for that last phrase.

And I'm going, no, that's because you missed the pauses out in like four phrases back because you were doing it phrase by phrase instead of looking at the whole arc of your journey.

And please don't think because Jeremy's just said this that we mean when you practice you sing the song from beginning to end. You can if you want to, but don't do it all the time. Yeah, play around with it. You should never do it all the time. So just some ideas. I mean, I think we've given quite a few.

One thing you can do with students and with choral groups as well is just play some background music in different patterns and pulse it and get people to breathe along with it so they begin to consciously change their breathing pattern. And then maybe get them making some noises or humming and doing things like that so they can start to engage, what's happening with that laryngeal motor cortex and all of the brain pathways to calibrate how they manage to to breathe in those patterns.

I think it's good with your students, if you want to do some work on breath management and pressure, then do use it within some phrases and some notes. Vamp different patterns on, on the keyboard for them. That's fun. Get them to use SOVT if that works for them playing with the patterns.

And then pick up on musical phrases and explore doing different breath decisions with them, what works for them. This is one of the things I love doing. We, I think it's in 12 Hours To Better Singing Teaching. We have an exercise, which is breath up beats, if you like. And one of the if people have done choral singing.

in any length of time. One of the things that they tend to do is to breathe in on the upbeat to wherever the phrase starts and they will breathe in on the final beat of the bar and occasionally even later no matter what the length of the phrase and no matter what the mood of the phrase. And one of the things we love doing is to, we're doing the count and then we're going okay so breathe in with one beat and they go and then that's the breath and I go now breathe in two beats.

and that instantly the breath flow in is slower because they have more time and it gives you a different mood. And if you are singing quiet and high, it is one of the best things that you can do is to breathe in earlier and slower and you 

are set up in a mood that really reflects how you sing. That's a lovely piece of advice.

Well, in conclusion, help your students calibrate their pressure flow rate within their system. for their music. And do you need to mention the P word in your lessons, as in pressure? No, not unless they ask, or if you think that the way they're speaking about their experience indicates it might be useful.

And thank you to Ian Howell for that very thoughtful post, and for everybody's input that I enjoyed very much, and to Heidi Moss. Yep. And breathe. And we'll put some links in for that. Let us know what you think, people, we'd love to hear from you. Yes. So, we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye bye.