Saxophone Airflow Basics
“Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.” – Charlie Parker
The new JodyJazz DV HR Tenor uses the patented DV secondary window to add mid and low harmonics, resulting in a more authoritative tone than normal tenor sax mouthpieces provide. And the long straight somewhat high baffle gives the mouthpiece it’s fantastic projection and cutting power along with excellent altissimo.
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The New DV HR Tenor from JodyJazz
Playing a woodwind instrument requires deep breathing, steady air flow and appropriate pressure on the reed. If any of these are lacking, your air flow will be impaired, which will have a negative impact on your performance. By paying attention to your breathing, posture and embouchure, you can ensure quality air flow.
Breathing
If you want to be able to sustain notes or play with a decent amount of volume, you have to make sure your lungs are as strong as they can be. If you smoke, stop. Not only does this habit cause cancer and other respiratory diseases, but it also damages your lungs, preventing you from taking deep breaths. Singing and blowing up balloons increases your lung capacity, as does aerobic exercise.
When you breathe, try to breathe in from your stomach. Push your stomach out as you breathe in and imagine that you’re forcing all the air into your stomach. This breathing method, called diaphragmatic breathing, helps you fill your lungs up more and will help you control the release of air.
Posture
Posture plays a large role in controlling and maintaining air flow. Slouching restricts the diaphragm, thereby inhibiting your ability to take full, deep breaths. When playing your instrument, it’s important to remember to sit up straight in your chair and roll your hips forward slightly. This allows your diaphragm to fully expand, making diaphragmatic breathing possible.
Embouchure
Proper embouchure has already been discussed in a previous article, so I won’t rehash details. Whether you use single or double-lip embouchure, you can restrict or increase air flow by applying (or releasing) pressure on the reed. The looser your embouchure, the more air is allowed into the mouthpiece, and vice versa. Too much pressure can result in the dreaded squeak, but regular practice will strengthen the muscles in your lips, thus paving the way for a well-formed embouchure.
As you can see, improving air flow is pretty basic. With a little practice, you will be a pro in no time.
Oh, and by the way…a shout out to Doron for hitting the one year mark on this awesome blog. This truly is the Best. Saxophone. Website. Ever.
October 17, 2011 @ 10:45 am
Bret,
Thanks for reading! Here’s the site where I got some of my information from (http://www.wikihow.com/Increase-Your-Lung-Capacity) where they explain that blowing up balloons creates resistance, which helps to strengthen your lungs.
I hope that answers your questions.
Thanks,
Danielle
October 17, 2011 @ 11:21 am
Interesting, but the article mixes up a number of concepts dealing with lung function (bear in mind that Wikihow articles are published without any editorial oversight, the same as Wikipedia).
“VO2 max” refers to the lung cells’ ability to extract oxygen from inhaled air, not the amount of air taken in. Increasing this is a healthy thing, but doesn’t increase the available air for saxophone playing. The author(s) of the article seem to confuse this “capacity” with lung volume.
“Strength” is an interesting one–certainly we want our lungs to be healthy, but they aren’t muscles and can’t move on their own. The diaphragm is the muscle of inhalation (so, talking about “diaphragm breathing” is like talking about “leg walking”).
I hope I’m not derailing the main point of your article, with which I’m generally in agreement, but the idea of increasing lung capacity seems to be one that is commonly accepted by wind players without scrutiny. The only sources I can find so far (on or offline) to support the idea of increasing lung capacity seem to be written by amateur fitness enthusiasts who don’t cite reliable sources.
October 17, 2011 @ 8:11 pm
Wow, that’s a really interesting point you bring up Bret, I never quite thought of the distinction between pure lung capacity versus the ability to extract oxygen from inhaled air.
Guess it’s time to start working on my circular breathing…
October 17, 2011 @ 10:06 am
“Singing and blowing up balloons increases your lung capacity, as does aerobic exercise.”
If you have a source for this information, I would be curious to know what it is. I’ve been told many times that various things will increase my lung capacity, but I can’t locate any evidence that a person can actually change the amount of air that their lungs can hold.
Certainly you can improve your use of your breathing system, but actual capacity is still a question mark for me.
February 18, 2014 @ 5:58 pm
Expanding lung capacity does not mean to increase the size of your lungs, but how much air can your lungs take, people normally do not use their lungs at 100%, so by expanding your lung capacity, you increase how much air you can take. Hope it helps, I’m an asthmatic and play flute and playing and instrument has really helped me increase how much air I can manage and has helped me to control more efficiently my air. Cheers!
October 17, 2011 @ 8:36 pm
Bret, you bring up some of the most important, yet overlooked points about breathing and lung capacity. I teach the Alexander Technique, functional anatomy, and body mapping to performing artists, and am often confronted with certain misconceptions about breathing.
Optimum lung capacity depends upon one thing primarily: the expansion of the thoracic cavity (the part of your torso encased by your ribcage). When we inhale, the diaphragm contracts, drawing the lungs and thoracic cavity downward (The diaphragm doesn’t move forward and backward. It is a large, thin muscle that is attached to the ribcage and spine), while at the same time the external intercostal muscles raise the ribs upward and outward (depending on where the ribs are located). This has the net effect of making the inside of the thoracic cavity (and hence the inside of the lungs) larger, thus creating a vacuum. It is this vacuum that draws the air into the lungs. (It works kind of like a bellows for a fireplace.)
So our lungs don’t get bigger because they fill with air. They fill with air because they get bigger. On the exhalation the diaphragm releases in an upward direction, while at the same time the internal intercostals gently move the rib cage downward and inward, thus returning our “bellows” to the neutral position. The idea that you “support” the breath with the diaphragm is not quite true, as the diaphragm is actually releasing on the exhalation (so it is impossible to push from the diaphragm). The thing we often “feel” as support of the exhalation is actually the abdominal muscles (especially that forward and backward movement at the abdominal region).
In my teaching experience, I find that there is far too much emphasis on pushing from the abdominal region to “support” the breath. For sure we need support from the abs, but we also need to let other muscles get into the picture, specifically the muscles in the back, around the rib cage and even the muscles in the chest. When a breath is well-supported, there is a nice distribution of work in the entire torso. If we just push from the abs, we overwork those muscles, stiffen the back and neck and (as if this isn’t bad enough) we limit the free movement of the diaphragm and entire thoracic cavity, thereby limiting how much air we can take into the lungs.
So the only thing we can do to optimize our lung capacity is to not interfere with the movements of the thorax. The thorax needs to expand in all three dimensions for us to reach what anatomists call “the vital capacity” (the greatest physically possible expansion of the lungs). This means that our torsos expand from top to bottom, front to rear, and side to side. The greater this movement, the more air that enters the lungs. This movement should happen naturally and effortlessly.
I’m simplifying this quite a bit here, but in principle, it is how it works. Two very good lay person books to better understand this are: The Anatomy of Movement, by Blandine Calais-Germain, and Anatomy of the Moving Body, by Ted Dimon.
Sorry for going on so long about this. And let me say that I greatly appreciated this post, in that it really does address (in my opinion) the three most important physical components of playing the saxophone well: breathing, posture and embouchure. Thanks for posting!
October 17, 2011 @ 10:30 pm
As always, Bret and Bill blowing me away with their insights. Thanks so much guys, you’ve really taken this article to the next level and given me (and anyone who reads your comments) some great food for thought.
October 18, 2011 @ 2:11 pm
Thanks, Bill. I totally agree.
I’ll make a note of the books you recommended. The more I try to understand the realities of saxophone playing, the more I realize I need to do in-depth study of acoustics, anatomy, fluid dynamics…
There’s a lot of folk wisdom in wind pedagogy that is taken for granted as truth. I think the body awareness movement (Alexander, body mapping, etc.) has the potential to disrupt, in a good way, decades of pedagogical tradition.
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[…] having strong lungs helps a saxophone player improve their endurance. Playing the saxophone can be very physically demanding, and having strong lungs helps the player maintain their stamina. It can also help them […]