I’ve been playing the whistle for a couple of years now and have learnt many tunes. Each tune i have learned slowly and gradually built up speed and rhythm, playing them over and over again.
After eventually mastering the speed and ornaments i still have problems with taking breaths in the right places, and find myself running out of breath.
Some tunes are easier than others as there are rhythmic pauses in the tune.
Tunes which are fast and constant are more difficult.
sometimes i feel that i have too much air in my lungs and am not able to breathe out. it’s a bit difficult to explain but it’s a bit like holding your breath for too long, and when you finally exhale too much time elapses for your next breath
has any one any advice?
chrisp, since no one else has responded to your question, I would suggest you do a search through past posts using the “search” facility provided at the top of each page here. This is a recurring topic and you will find a range of suggestions. Just search on breathing, breath control and so on. You should get a lot of references in return.
I believe I understand exactly what you are saying. Have found myself with the same feeling of what to do with the excess stale air. I let some of it leak out around the whistle head, and sometimes i let some leak out from the corner of my mouth. Will take a little practice to get the timing right so you can inhale at the right moment. Letting air leak out through the nose is not as easy to do as from the mouth.
Two solutions to the extra air…my opinion is it’s a function of the particular whistle you’re playing. Some don’t require much air, so you can play long passages without blowing out too much. Some whistles have an easier balance between how much you breathe out a tune and how slowly you exhale.
First solution is get a different whistle. A Generation, for example has a good, comfortable balance. An Overton, Chieftain, Harper, Abell high D have low air requirements and you get that discomfort. If you want to play those anyway, (second solution) learn to lose air through your nose or around the fipple while you’re playing. I need to do that with my Abell, and will occasionaly, after taking a deep breath, let most of it out and take another breath soon after at an appropriate place in the tune.
Tony
Thanks for all the replies.
This forum is fantastic, there is no one i know of where i live who plays the whistle, so thank you all for the advice.
I have never thought of letting some air leak out, it makes great sense.
I was out late last night so i’ll have to put it all into practice after the headache has gone.
Personally I’ve never had the problem of too much breath while playing whistle, however it is a real problem for while playing oboe which uses practically no air - you can play for as long as you can hold your breath, and have to stop to take a breath not because of running out of air but because there is no oxygen left!
Solution - breathe out and then in, if you don’t have time to do this then breathe out, play and then breathe in. Also if you are not running out of air don’t take to deep a breath to start with, breathing deeply or incorrectly (raising your shoulders for example) tends to make one anxious which is not good for playing.
It is amazing how many people really do not know how to breathe correctly, to completely fill their lungs, many when told to take a deep breath will puff up their lungs and suck in their stomachs - if they let their stomachs out (using their diaphragm) they could breathe in more. When playing a wind instrument your chest can be almost motionless.
Re: the “too much air” problem; I have an apparently natural tendency to let air out through my nose as I play - I even do it unhelpfully on flute where I really could do with not wasting the air! I only recognised I was doing it a couple of years ago and have sort of worked at trying not to, not totally successfully as yet, on flute. I’d thus not experienced your problem on whistle, so doing it purposely would certainly be one solution. I think, however that the other point about phrasing - well chosen, rhythmically appropriate breathing points, is the best approach - and maybe not taking in too much air at those, as has been suggested - “sipping” small amounts of air quite frequently is a useful technique sometimes, where it can be fitted to the music without detriment - that goes for classical fluting too. For those long phrases where you run out of air, practice and time will bring you ability to sustain longer, and you can also look to ways to adapt your interpretation of a tune to create a breathing point - it isn’t like classical discipline where you’re not allowed to change the dots if you run short!
I forgot to mention that letting air ‘leak’ out is another thing oboists do though I find it distracting when sitting next to someone doing it and the sound bugs me enough that I never worked on perfecting it. There are oboists who circular breathe so they must have some way of getting rid of air while playing.
‘Sipping air’ continuously while playing oboe leads to having lungs full of deoxygenated air!
I’m not sure of how applicable any of this is because in my experience one runs out of air while playing whistle (or flute) not the oxygen in the air and you just have to figure out where to take breaths. ITM in particular does not always have obvious breath places - just listen to good players and see what they do.