Newbie question: Timing of breaths?

Whistle
1

Hi everyone, first post. So, please excuse me if I’m asking the same old tired question that’s been asked about a billion times before. :laughing:

Anyways, I’m just at the beginning of my journey into the dark seedy underworld of penny whistle playing, and as such I’m full of questions regarding technique. Right now I’d like to ask about breathing.

So far after two days I’m able to do scale runs up & down the 3 octaves without squeaking half the time on low D, and I’m doing intervals as well to familiarize myself with the fingering for each note. My biggest problem now is that towards the end I’m running outta steam and need to top up the lungs. Oxygen addiction is such a cruel mistress.

This has left me wondering if there is a natural period for breathing, or a way to work it into music/scale patterns to make it less obvious. Is there a specific pattern that players follow such as: X number of bars, or Y number of beats/notes?

Hoping to move on next week to learning some traditional Irish tunes, and I’d really like to get proper breathing habits ingrained early.

Any help, or pointing me to the right post/video/website is greatly appreciate. Thanks.

2

This sums it up pretty well:
http://www.rogermillington.com/siamsa/brosteve/breathe.html

3

Welcome to the whistle forum.

Yes, Brother Steve gives good whistle info.

Practice and the breathing points will develop with experience. Trying to play entire lines or parts of tune on one breath usually doesn’t work. Breathing points will change with experience especially as rhythm for tunes progresses.

Enjoy your whistling.

4

Phrasing. Phrasing. Phrasing. Mary Bergin is an excellent model. https://youtu.be/rdJYbOkbetQ and many other videos.

Bob

5

I don’t know if you’re coming from the world of the Boehm flute, or Baroque flute, or Recorder, or orchestral music, or what have you.

When I used to go around teaching Irish flute workshops the breathing-spots was one of the main stumbling blocks for people from those backgrounds.

Because in those sorts of music the player is expected to play every note on the page. Breaths have to be sneaked in between notes.

And when a piece, say a Baroque piece, has a long unbroken stream of eighthnotes coming up, the player will anticipate this by taking a huge breath to try to get through the whole stream of notes without having to take a breath.

It was difficult to convey to these people that, more or less, all Irish reels and jigs are nothing but that: long unbroken streams of eighthnotes! You can’t play a set of three reels, three times through each, on one breath! So traditional Irish flute and whistle playing has come up with a different way.

That way is to leave notes out in order to carve out a place to breathe. I have a page demonstrating this that I used to hand out at workshops, I suppose I should take a pic of it and share it.

If you learn tunes from a flute or whistle player the work of arranging, the creating of the breath-spots, is done for you. But we’re often in the position of learning tunes from fiddlers etc whose instruments don’t have to do this, and in most cases an Irish flute or whistle player will have to get good at arranging tunes for his instrument.

The easiest default place to breathe is where the tune parks on a note for the space of three eighth-notes, that is, what I might call a “long roll situation” (the situation exists whether or not you choose to actually put in a long roll there). You can touch on what would be the first note of the roll, leave out the second note, and come back in on the third note. Since the first note is just briefly touched on, it gives you nearly the space of a quarternote to breathe.

6

Thank you everyone for pointing out the way for this humbled newb.

Brother Steves website was helpful, I like the concept of shortening some of the notes to allow for a quick breath to be taken in. Though it does present the problem of finding the best spots, but I’m certain with the jigs and reels I’ll find the right spots.

I’m learning them first on mandolin then learning them for the whistle, so I can experiment with the timing and finding the best spots. Idea is eventually to do the reverse, find the sheet music, sight read it with the whistle, than move to mandolin after I’ve got the notes/rhythm/tempo down.

As for the leaving of spaces and dropping of notes for breathing I do remember there being points in the sheet music I played as a kid on the recorder. Canadian music education in Ontario in the eighties was based around the recorder, so I have more than a passing familiarity with it; in fact I’m looking at one of my old recorders right now as I type this. As you said though the music is designed to be played on a non-woodwind instrument, hence no pausing naturally given for breathing.

Thanks for the info on the flute as well. I’m presently also torturing myself and the neighbours by trying to learn the fife on the side (Yamaha YRF-21). Currently at the “trying to make a damn sound that’s consistent” stage right now.

Lol I guess I’ve got a bit to chew on.

7

You might even just pick out the melody on the whistle without reference to the sheet music after you learn the melody on mandolin. Eliminate the ‘middle-man’ so to speak. It might help you hear the most natural places to ‘drop’ a note to breath. Just sayin’.

Bob

8

To give an example of what I mean about using the “long roll places” as breathing places, here’s the beginning of a jig.

The baseline assumption is eighth-notes, that is, 6 eighth-notes per bar.

| EEE BBB | EEE AF#D | EEE BBc# | dc#B AF#D |

Let’s assume for the moment that EEE and BBB are long rolls, BB is a short roll.

E’E,E
B’B,B
'B,B

the blips above and below I’m using to represent upper and lower gracenotes, cuts and pats.

So just in the 4 bars above you have 5 ready-made places to breathe.

While the possibilities in each tune are practically endless, when you listen to different fluteplayers (which are perhaps better to listen to because they have to take breaths more often) you may find yourself hearing a wide range of approaches to selecting the breathing-spots.

You’ll hear players who always take their breaths in the same spots as they cycle through three playings of the same tune. It’s as if to them the breathing-spots are part of their arrangement of the tune, and never vary. Were a fiddler to learn a tune from one of these fluteplayers, they would have to fill in the breathing-spots with notes of their own choosing.

You’ll hear players seem to make a point of taking their breathing-spots in different places every time a phrase, part of a tune, and entire tune is repeated. In listening to these players the listener gets the sense of the totality of the tune.

Anyhow with those four bars you could do many things including the below.

Here I’m using the underscore to show the missing eighth-note.

| EEE B_B | EEE AF#D | EEE B_c# | dc#B AF#D |

| EEE BBB | E_E AF#D | EEE BBc# | d_B AF#D |

| EEE BBB | EEE AF#D | E_E BBc# | dc#B AF#D |

and so on. It is very common to take a breath after the B in the 3rd bar.

Also in any of the roll places (long or short) you can play a long note, often bending up to it. And many other things, so that you can play through all the repetitions of those four bars in three playings of the tune and never play those four bars the same way twice.

About how often you put in these breathing-spots, I put them in as often as necessary and no more. It would sound odd, to me, for a player to go a long unbroken phrase, then put in two breathing-spots in quick succession. In other words they seems to have a natural spacing which follows how often the player needs to breathe, rather than an artificial gimmick.

Of course there are exceptions, and there are fluteplayers who have a percussive style where they take breathing-spots all over the place, more often than they could possibly need to breathe. They turn a necessity into a stylistic thing, and their percussive breath-pushes which accompany their breathing-spots give lift and drive to the tune.

9

Wow, thanks everyone for all the information. Fascinating and really helpful, because there’s nothing more important to sounding good on a wind instrument than breathing well. It’s taken me decades to get this part good enough to really make some music!

10

All above is brilliant advice!
I’d only add that diaphragm breathing is essential.
If you do not use deep-diaphragm to fill your air-column, you will be looking for 2 or more breathing-points in each 8-bar part.
You will find yourself taking breath at the beginning of each part which will deaden the tune.
A good diaphragm breath can even take you through 16 bars.

The point of this is not about “breath control” per se.
It’s about giving yourself options.
So when you have diaphragm breathing habituated, you get options - you stop thinking about your breath and start thinking about the rhythm.

Your in-breath becomes a drum-beat.

I find it useful to think I am connecting with the earth I stand on when I use my diaphragm.
When I feel the earth, I know how high I can leap - and it will not fail me.
If you practice this, you will feel how diaphragm breathing goes all the way down to your feet.

After that - you can practice all the advice given above with confidence.