I’m a 56-year-old beginner to both high and low whistles using a Low D Kerry Optima which requires little more air than a high whistle though it’s still an effort for me. I would dearly love to graduate to other low d’s one day but my lungs are weak. Do any of you have tips on learning diaphragm breathing or on exercises to build up lung capacity . . . or is it something learned through actual playing?
Many thanks.
lie on your back, place your hands on your belly. as you breathe in your belly rises and vice versa So you can feel like you are pushing your hands up with your bely while inhaling. This is how babies breath but many adults use chest breathing .
… any help?
Yes, diaphragm breathing is good. Always take full, deliberate breaths, no shallow little huffs. Try not to let your air reserve drop below ~30% or so. Tighten up your embouchure to better control the outflow of air (more velocity, less volume).
IMO, the best exercise is playing, and more playing. It gets better (and I’m older than you). The first time I picked up a low whistle I nearly passed out. 
I had that problem, too. What helped me was to practice standing instead of sitting. Make sure you are not putting too much of the whistle in your mouth, either. It shouldn’t feel like you are blowing-up a balloon. If you get it right, it’s not that hard.
As others have said, using the diaphragm is the key, and the fact that you know this will get you a long way. A good way of at least getting you aquainted with your diaphragm, so to speak, is to do a sinple exercise that we used to do as a warm up back in the days when I was still in a school choir. Place a hand on your stomach and do short consonants. Just, to yourself, exclaim B. P. T. K. (Buh. Puh. Tuh. Kuh.) etc. That’ll give you the feeling of using your diaphragm for pushing out air. MTGuru does have a point in not playing with shallow huffs, and that is not the goal with the exercise, but just getting you familiar with the feeling, which will get you further down the way. Basically, just expanding and exaplifying what Will said.
Furthermore I’d point out that breathing isn’t a bad thing. It does feel like that at first, the feeling of “no, I have to breath, that means that I’ll miss a couple of notes!”. Breathing is an essential part of the music. Use it to your advantage. Make it a part of the flow of the tune, the rhythm. They key is to not breathe at the same place in a tune every time. Certain very good flute players use a lot of “short” breathing (that is taking breaths oftenly, but still not doing it in a shallow and uncontrolled way) and huffing and puffing, playing very rhythmically, as would be a prefered way of playing when playing unamplified for dancers for example.
Hope that made any sort of sense, late at night as it may be, and deprived of sleep for the last four days or so as I may be.
Another though to add to the mix. Is it volume of breath that you find difficult? Would you be able to cope with pressure of breath? If so then you might try a whistle with more back-pressure. I have a medium-blowing low D made by Colin Goldie and it takes way less air than any other low whistle I have tried. The back-pressure creates it’s own initial challenges though. One advantage is that it is far harder to overblow unintentionally in the excitement of a session, so it is much easier to play along in a noisy setting.
But learning about control of the air flow on lower pressure whistles is helping my playing on them all.
First off, Mikethebook, welcome !
I took a music class once that devoted one session to a “breathing gym”. One exercise was to lie down and place a good heavy book on your belly. Then, use your breathing to lift the book up and down, exploring your limits (both top+btm). The goals are to both practice taking deep full breaths, and, to focus on and cultivate an awareness of your breathing. Try it with your eyes closed.
Breathing is just like any motor skill. Your breathing muscles will get stronger, and you’ll get better at it, with practice.
Anecdote for the day: I knew of a guy once who had lung problems. He also loved the sound of bagpipes. So, he started to learn + play (talk about air requirements!). Well, after playing a while, he had a lung checkup. The doctor was astounded in the improvement in his peak flow and total volume !
Best wishes !
trill
I agree with Dr Phill, using a whistle with more back pressure will definitely help. You would think the opposite as you have to blow a bit harder and it requires a bit of work on embouchure but in fact it’s ultimately much easier to control your breathing, as well as tone and intonation. A breathier whistle, with less back pressure, will usually take more air and is easier to under or over blow, especially in sessions if you’re struggling to hear. Both my high and low D’s from Colin Goldie have more back pressure than any other whistles I’ve tried (he makes them to suit, from little to lots of back pressure). I initially got them like this because I was swapping between Highland Pipes and whistles during gigs and the high back pressure evened out the differences in the blowing to a certain degree, now I wouldn’t have them any other way.
Thanks for all you replies which are encouraging. First thing I came across this device http://www.ultrabreathe.com/ and wondered whether that would help expand my lungs but obviously I need to train myself to breathe from the diaphragm and a friend who is a singing coach is going to give me some exercises.
Back pressure is still something of a mystery to me. I really don’t know what that is and how it works with air requirements but I’ve come to see that expereinced players prefer more back pressure because it makes note control easier and the whistle easier to play. As I say, a mystery to me. But as regards the question Dr Phill put to me, I think the problem is a lack of capacity rather than an inability to apply air pressure. It just seems to me that applying pressure would result in using more air!!! If someone could explain back pressure in simple terms that might be helpful.
I do like the sound of Colin Goldie’s ability to tailor a whistle to one’s needs.
Thanks again guys.
Imagine that you are blowing through a smaller hole. To get the same air speed you have to push the air harder, and this feels like applying more pressure, or feeling more ‘resistance’. But because the hole is smaller the amount of air flowing through it is smaller.
Does that help?
yes, standing! I have to stand to play my low D convincingly.
Also breath control is mentioned above; try playing a single note, on a full breath for as long as you can , and extend that limit day by day, try to release as little air as needed , with practice this becomes automatic. I have a Low G and A which are IMO intermediate between low D and high, for air requirements. I recall many yrs ago using the G as a halfway stage to the low D.
practice deep breathing to enlarge your lung capacity.
Ps [ in relation to diaphragm breathing I like the book idea, an improvement on the hands IMO. cheers
pps though ive not tried the gadget I think it might be worthy while, Im looking at them myself… every little thing that can help… Im for it.
Great guys. Thanks a lot to you all.
Can I push you a bit further? If back pressure creates this resistance liker a smaller hole, then how does it make playing a note easier, indeed the whislte easier, given this extra effort? Logically, I would have thought that no back pressure would lead to easier note playing. Thanks for your patience. I’m just eager to learn what I can.
First a caveat - I am not an expert player and so some of my opinions may be suspect. But here goes…
To get a note out of the whistle the air needs to move with sufficient velocity across the blade. It is easy to reach this velocity with very little pressure on an easy-blowing whistle. It is harder to achieve this on a harder blowing whistle. On an easy blowing whistle a variation in the pressure leads to an increase in the air velocity, which changes the quality of the note, and ultimately drives the resonance of the air column to the next harmonic. I guess you could draw a graph, with air speed increasing along the bottom and note produced/volume/quality going upward. In fact I have done a ‘back-of-an-envelope’ sketch:
With a harder blowing whistle the same increase in pressure leads to a smaller increase in the air velocity. A sort of ‘damping’ if you like. It makes the notes more stable, and it means that you can control the air speed much more finely. This means that you can control the quality of the note more precisely. You can control much more accurately how far you move left and right on the graph.
Think of it like the control you can exert over your mouse - you can reduce how far it travels across the desktop for a given amount of physical movement. This helps you to be more accurate with your mouse movements, but requires you to make bigger physical movements to make the mouse move the whole way across the screen. The physical movements here are analogous to the pressure that you blow with your lungs, the distance the mouse moves is analogous to the changes in the air column vibration.
Does that help any?
You might find this interesting:
http://www.adrianabreukink.com/ADRIANA/INHALEROREXHALER
I found it quite revelatory and very pertinent to my own breathing/playing style.
Phill, thanks for going to such trouble and length but it was worthwhile. I guess in your graph the vertical axis would represent the amount of back pressure but inverted so that with little back pressure there would be more chance of running into chaos and much less with increased back pressure.
I assume also, perhaps wrongly, that back pressure and wind requirement for a given note are inversely related. If one increases the back pressure one also reduces the wind requirement. Having said that my Kerry Optima is described as having little wind requirement but only moderate back pressure so maybe that relationship doesn’t work completely.
Great stuff. Thanks again.
Killthemessenger. I rushed through the article once but I’ll need to read it again when I have more time. Many thanks.
It is a pleasure to help, if I have. Trying to explain the phenomenon helps me to clarify my thoughts. I do not think the vertical axis is back-pressure, I think of it as some form of sound output/quality. The ‘graph’ attempts to show what happens for one note on one whistle as air velocity increases across the blade. It is not a true graph illustrating a relationship between two variables. It is more like a spectrum, or even a time line…
You are pushing my approximation at physics a bit too far here. Certainly there will be a relationship, but whether it will involve powers (squares, cubes and stuff) or not I have no idea. On all the whistles that I have tried a lower back pressure has required more air, or more embouchure control. Add to that the fact that these estimates are subjective, and that ‘low’ back pressure and ‘low’ air requirements are thought to be desirable qualities you can see how these descriptions could suffer from a marketing bias.