by Vocal Coach, Whitney Doucet
I’m writing this post about why breathing exercises are so important in hopes to save you from making the same mistakes I made when I first started taking voice lessons. “Inhale through the mouth, and exhale, slowly, through the mouth,” I remember as my voice coach would practice this exercise at the beginning of each lesson. I would inhale while thinking to myself “ya, ya, this is great, now let’s sing… I run Cross Country, my lungs are in tip-top shape. I’ll be fine without this exercise.” Now, my belting was decent, I could hit high notes, sometimes. I never really associated breathing with being able to sing my favorite songs.
FLASH FORWARD a few years and many performances later, my eyes were about to be opened into my shock of how these breathing exercises were going to change my life.
In my first week of becoming a voice coach, I had done the breathing exercise with my students over 15 times in one week, and by the end of the week, to my surprise, those “high notes” I once thought I had a handle on flew out of my mouth smoothly and almost effortlessly. I instantly knew what had happened. “THEY WEREN’T LYING!” I thought to myself as I kept singing and listening to the sounds that were coming out. “WOW.” Doing the breathing exercises daily with my students made such a huge difference in my voice that I never went back to slacking on them.
I try to tell my students this story so they can avoid my mistakes and hopefully learn that while breathing exercises may be “boring” or seem least likely to help your voice they are in fact very useful and SO IMPORTANT!”