Breathing while Playing the Saxophone

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Let us talk about breathing, since this is one of the most important and one of the most challenging aspects of saxophone playing. Breathing is very important. You want to maximize your breath potential as much as possible. First of all, as much as you can, try to breathe from the gut. Let me explain; some people have the notion that when you take a breath, you suck in your gut, like this. No, maybe you see that on cartoons but that is not how you maximize your potential. You breathe by expanding your gut; by expanding your lungs. Your tummy should go out when you take a big breath and you fill it with air. In fact, a music teacher of mine used to show me this exercise which I find somewhat useful. Again, if you are in the office, you might not want to do this right now but basically, take a big heavy book or a couple of books, for instance, I could use the Harvard New Dictionary of Music. Lie down on the floor and as you take a big breath, that book should go up, not down. That is how you should be breathing when you play the saxophone. I often tell my students that when they play the saxophone or any wind instrument, for that matter, you should breathe like a whale. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. I am not a marine biologist but I do know that whales are not fish. They are mammals; they do not breath water, they breath air just like we do. What they do is, they swim around their ocean, doing their whale business for a couple of hours without breathing and then they come up to the surface of the water and take a massive breath and again go back under the ocean and swim around for another couple of hours doing their whale business. You should breathe like a whale. Now, I am not saying, you should go a few hours without breathing. That would be a bad idea but when playing the saxophone, you want to take as bigger breath as you can as infrequently as possible. What I do not want to hear is lots of little breaths between notes. That is not a very musical way to play. You want to play as many notes as possible before taking as bigger breath as possible. You can do this by breathing through your guts; you can take in as much air as possible and breathe through your mouth, not your nose. The nose is not a very useful breathing apparatus. You cannot take in a lot of air through your nose. Take a bigger breath as you can through your nose. It is hard; your nostrils close right up. You want to breathe through your mouth. Now, you do not have to take the saxophone out of your mouth, you can just kind of open up the sides of your mouth and breath through those holes in your embouchure. Make sense? Good. Again, breathing is a very difficult topic and it is a life long struggle. All saxophonists work on their breath control and their breath capacity throughout their entire carriers.

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