Hi folks , Ive got some great help here before , Ill try again , thanks.
Been playing 6 months now and have managed to get a half decent tone some of the time and got a few tunes under my belt and some ornamentation.
My trouble is breathing and where to do it.
I may have bad technique or bad lungs but I seem to have to breathe more than what I hear from the professionals on CD.
As such im not always able to wait till an appropriate long note or musical rest so I have to ditch notes.
I aim for ending notes or intermediate notes of a bar ( e.g. the 2 or 3 , 5 or 6 of a jig ) but what my mouth does is blurt out a fraction of the note I aim to leave out.
Is it best the leave out the whole 8th note or is what Im doing OK?
And in general , do folks tend to breathe at the same spot in the same tunes or are better players more spontaneous?
For now I tend to need to know where I’m going to breathe or I fall apart!
The stronger your embouchure gets, the less air you have to use because the more you are able to precisely control what you do have, so keep working on that - it goes some way to explaining why the players you are listening have to breathe less than you do.
Long tones (just holding notes from a full breath for as long as you can) can help significantly, even just a few minutes worth each time you practice.
Additionally, make sure that you are breathing properly. Without the flute, expell all your air, breathe in filling your diaphragm, stomach expanding, then expand your ribcage and chest, filling them, then fill what ever is left. Hard to do in the midst of a tune I know, but spending a little time on the mechanics is worthwhile.
As to where to breathe in the tune, there are as many places to breathe as you can imagine, or as there are variations. Shortening a longer note to snatch a breath in the resulting rest is fine as long as the rhythm remains solid and so long as you don’t only use that way. Dropping notes entirely is okay too as long as they don’t damage the tune. At the end of phrases of course can be good again as long as you don’t always breathe there (and change the way the phrases lie to make it different to). I think it is not such a good idea to plan where you will breathe. It gets you stuck in one way through the tune and stops you varying not only breathing places, very important in trad flute playing, but also makes it difficult to vary both tune and ornaments. It also might stop you developing the sense of where to breathe as you are playing. Rather, when you are practicing a tune, play it nice and slowly and look for places to breathe and notes to drop for breaths, if you make a mistake, no harm done, but try to keep the tune going. You might try playing it through a couple of times taking breaths at all the ends of phrases. Then play it again a couple of times through only this time the only place you are not allowed to breath is at the ends of phrases. Again - when you figure out a few places to breath in a tune anyway, play it through that way a couple of times and then play it again not allowing yourself to breathe in those places and looking for others. Getting to know your way around the tune like this is really useful for varying it and getting your breathing to second nature.
Just to echo Bepoq, did a week with Fintan Vallely down in Miltown this summer; he was talking about breathing at one stage and commented that when learning a new tune, he nearly always had a little trouble with rhythm and breathing until he had run through the tune several times. While doing this, he would figure out several possible places to take a breath but not always using those places. i.e. he would vary on the fly but generally using one of several options - at least that’s the way I understood him!
The most important thing obviously is not to drop the note where the beat lies.
Have you tried the other way round? Breathe as often as is possible during the tune, shortening notes, leaving notes out etc. Breathe far more that you need, and play the tune like that for a while. Then connect the very short phrases to longer ones as it makes musical sense to you, but just as long as you have air. Experiment. Listen.
I have to try that myself when I get home tonight
(Beware. Not an expert, not a teacher, barely a flauflutister, maybe some kind of musician etc.)
At the risk of kicking off another round of Ears Vs Dots debate, how about listening to how other players play it/phrase it/breathe through it?
One of the reasons why Mike Rafferty ranks so high in my esteem is that listening to him play makes the above much more ‘do-able’ than, say, listening to the likes of Molloy or McGoldrick.
Let me second or third or whatever bepoq’s post. I would go a little further and say that dropping a note here and there isn’t just allowed, it’s part of what makes Irish flute music different from fiddle, box, or pipes. Once I discovered dropping the occasional note, I listened and almost every player I listen to does it now and then. As Chris Norman said to me, there’s almost no such thing as breathing too much, but breathing too seldom is disastrous. Another teacher played me a Micho Russell piece in which he breathed something like seven times in the A part of a slow reel.
The high a in the fourth bar and the middle d’s in the penultimate bars are good places. If you make those notes (especially the a, which is a major accent) loud but short it gives the proper accent. I like the g fifth bar of the second line as a breathing place because there are four in a row – it breaks up the monotony, although rolling the first three and cutting the last one sounds good on the flute. Dropping the first of any of the double e’s works – again, if it’s the first phrase of the measure, giving a big accent and shortening the first note yields a good effect.
There’s little to add beyond what Ben said. Once your embouchure is more focused and you’ve learned to develop effective breath support, it won’t take much more air to play the flute than to play the whistle. When I was first starting out I had to breathe twice as often on the flute as the whistle; now I can use pretty much the same phrase lengths on both instruments.
In the beginning you may want to concentrate just on completing phrases in one breath, and thus you’ll breathe in the same place every time through the tune. But once you get comfortable with a tune, changing where you take breaths is an easy way to come up with simple variations, and it’ll be a lot more interesting to both you and to anyone listening to you play. If you have trouble with this, try continuing to play the tune with your fingers while you take a breath, you’re less likely to miss a beat and disrupt the flow of the tune.
I’ve heard the invocation “breathe often and vary it” more than once here and elsewhere and it makes a great deal of sense. However, is it possible to overdo it?
Reason I ask - I have a certain album by a well-known player that I can’t listen to at all. Because there are breaths at seemingly every available opportunity - to the point that it seriously disrupts the continuity of the tune. I’m normally a very accepting listener and can enjoy most player’s recordings, but this one stands out because of the too frequent breathing. Is there something ‘zen’ about it that I am just not getting, or do experienced listeners sometimes have this same reaction?
Disclaimer - I am not saying this player is ‘bad’ or not woth listening to or anything else - just that I prefer not to.
Personally I don’t agree with the “breathe often” part of it. You can do that, and some very good flute players do (Emer Mayock comes to mind), but I personally prefer taking longer phrases. Phrasing really should be dictated by the tune, and if you can take longer phrases when the tune asks for them, I think it sounds better.
The analogy I always use is that you wouldn’t say “Darling, I [breath] love you!” You’d say it all in one breath. Similarly in music there are logical phrases that usually sound better if they’re not broken up.
I echo Brad et all. You will get longer phrases the longer you play because your embochure is getting better. I’m just now to the point where I feel like I won’t die of lack of oxygen when I play the flute for a while. In the mean time, try shortening the phrases and when you get that down, play around with making the phrases longer. It will come in time.
ah now Brad - you and I have always had a different approach to the music, phrase wise. I know you go more along the Paddy Carty route - breathe at the natural musical phrases and make it sound invisible - great stuff
for the style I like though, the way I hear the music, the phrases are there to be broken, rearranged given a different drive, a surprising lift - Desi Wilkinson or O’Grada, Bradley, Hastings, Duignan, McKenna etc.
I agree that one way to play very well is to follow the phrasing of the tune, but it is not the only way. We are lucky in the variety of ways we can approach our music I reckon.
