Hi there.
Aaron here from HowtoSing.com and I want to talk to you about how to sing from your diaphragm.
What is a diaphragm first of all?
A diaphragm is just below the ribs.
It separates a lot of the intestines down here and what happens with the rib cage down
here.
What happens with the diaphragm, you've heard a lot of this whole thing, the diaphragm breathing.
How do you breathe from your diaphragm, sing from your diaphragm?
The diaphragm, it doesn't intake any air.
Your stomach doesn't intake any air so I'm going to talk a little bit about expanding
the stomach and stuff like that.
Anything that actually takes air in is your lungs but what happens with the diaphragm,
when you have proper posture and I will talk a little bit about that is that the diaphragm,
it descends and opens up the cavity there so your lungs could expand, pushes the intestines
out of the way.
So your lungs can expand to get the air that you need.
See what we typically do throughout the day, breathing for singing and breathing for speaking
are different.
That's why people are like, “I know how to breathe.
I don't need to learn to breathe to sing.
I breathe everyday.
How do you think I'm alive?”
Breathing for singing and breathing for speaking are usually opposite and I won't totally get
into it except to say that mostly we take kind of shallow breaths and our shallow breaths
are kind of like the raising of the chest and the chest lowers, like that.
I mean it's more subtle than that but the way that we're supposed to breathe is the
chest stays how it is.
It doesn't raise and lower but when you breathe in, the expanding is happening on the sides
here below the ribs and in the stomach and then when you breathe out, again the chest
should remain where it is and then what comes in is not the chest doesn't fall.
The chest should stay up but what comes in is the stomach and the sides of the ribs.
That's what it is basically.
Belly breathing, diaphragm breathing is proper posture, the alignment of your head, neck
and shoulders and then you take a nice, complete breath and not the short breaths.
Like I'm talking about, that chest breathing, not [breathes rapidly] that kind of breathing
but take a nice breath for singing and you will expand your stomach and then your sides
and that will cause the diaphragm to descend and as long as you keep your if you keep your
chest up while you're singing, let it go.
Let it cave down then the diaphragm will stay ascended for as long as you need it to.
Once your chest kind of caves in, then the diaphragm comes back up.
So the idea is to remain in your proper posture.
Keep your chest not like super high but keep your chest relatively high and good posture,
arms relatively along your side.
I know when you're singing, sometimes you will be walking around and moving around but
just basic structure should be somewhere around here.
You want to take a complete breath, not the short breaths but you don't want to like tank
up.
You don't want to get as much air as you can possibly get.
Singing does not take a ton of air.
You just need a good complete breath and it comes out.
It's [0:03:00] [Indiscernible] as it comes out.
When we're babies, we actually breathe correctly.
If you watch a baby breathe, their stomach expands when they breathe in and it contracts
when they breathe out but somewhere along the way, we get this [breathes rapidly] kind
of chest breathing, short breath breathing.
We need to reverse that.
So I want to give you an exercise, a couple of exercises.
One is actually like a vocal exercise that will help you with your breathing and help
you with your diaphragm breathing and help you connect your breath, how you need to with
diaphragm breathing.
But the first one is just how to get that down to where you are expanding when you inhale.
If you lay down, laying down is a really good way to do it or just bending at the waist.
So it will also do when you stand up but breathe in and you could feel the sides in your stomach
expand and when you breathe out, feel that contract.
You want to get in the habit of doing that.
If you notice, that's probably not what you do.
That's not what most people do even though that's proper for singing.
One way to do that is those exercises laying on the ground and feeling that, feeling the
expand and contract is a good way to kind of get in the habit of doing it and then I've
got an exercise too.
This basically takes the vowels and puts an H in front of them so it's hay, he, hi, ho,
hu, hay, he, hi, ho, hu, and basically you can do that a few times, maybe 30 seconds
a day just to connect your breath with your singing.
Hay, he, hi, ho, hu and make sure that you're doing all this stuff that I'm saying.
You're expanding when you're breathing in and you're contracting when you're breathing
out.
So anyway, give that a try.
Hopefully that helps connect your breathing with your singing because breathing, proper
breathing and breathing from your diaphragm really is probably the most important thing
when it comes to singing because everything else is based on that.
All of singing, all the scales and singing the higher notes and agility, everything that
comes along with singing is based on a proper breath management system which is basically
breathing from your diaphragm.
So I hope that's helpful.
If you want to visit me, like I said, I'm at HowtoSing.com.
You can just type that in.
Come check me out or down actually below there's a link just below here.
You can click on that.
I've got a bunch of like tips and tricks and a lot of great information.
I just put a video up actually about how to it's a good, long video with good content
about how to sing high notes but how to sing high notes specifically without tension which
is usually the problem.
When you hit the high notes, your larynx raises up and you start getting tense.
But anyway, check it out at HowtoSing.com and I will see you there.