Proper Breathing For Singing

How you manage your breath when you sing can drastically change the sound of your singing voice. In order to sing well you need to learn proper breathing for singing.

If you try to hold your breath and sing, it just won't work. You also can't sing loud phrases without having air to exhale. Although breathing is natural, when you sing you need to train your body to breathe efficiently throughout an entire song. Learning proper breathing for singing will help you sing through all those long phrases in your favorite songs without running out of air.

Unlike normal breathing, when you sing you need to inhale quickly and exhale slowly. You need to get a full breath quickly between phrases and then sustain a smooth exhalation while you sing demanding high notes and long slow phrases.

Proper breathing for singing means you must learn to control how much air you need, at what rate you will breathe in, and at what rate you will breathe out. The rate at which you exhale is important, as this determines how much air you send to your vocal cords and for how long. As you exhale, you must be able to keep your rib cage expanded while using your abdominal muscles to push your diaphragm against your lungs, releasing air in a steady stream to your vocal cords.

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Proper Breathing For Singing: Breathing In 

Most beginning singers are familiar with the concept of “breathing from the diaphragm,” or area at the bottom of the ribcage. This description of proper breathing technique is misleading, because what you really want to do, as a singer, is engage all areas of your body around your lungs and rib cage in the act of breathing. Therefore, I would suggest that you don’t think of breathing from the diaphragm but rather imagine yourself breathing with your whole body.

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Proper Breathing For Singers: Breathing Out 

All that air that you’ve filled your lungs with is there for slow release over a long period, not for using all at once. When you are singing, you may think that the more air you use, the better you will sound. This is not the case at all. Forcing too much air through your vocal cords will make you sing worse, because your vocal cords must tighten to hold back the volume of air. A good tone can be produced without much air at all; in fact, using less air will actually make it easier to reach those higher notes.

So you don’t want too much air and you don’t want too little air, you want just the right amount of air that your vocal cords can handle because singing with too much air can produce a sound that is airy and breathy.

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