Professional Vocal Workout - Part 1 "Advanced Breathing Technique"

[Music] [Music] bread [Music] and [Music] hey i'm eric arsenault and welcome to your daily vocal workout yes i said work out and not warm up because this training involves um a higher degree of coordination and also more precise and nuanced control of your body so watch this part now and then after you've seen it a time or two then you can skip it in the future but i'm gonna answer some questions that i'm sure you're gonna ask first off this is a daily vocal workout which means yes you do it every day so you can combine it with techniques from the warm up and from other videos that i've done listen to your body do what combination works best for you if you're at this stage where this video is right for you then i consider you to be somewhat advanced if my daily vocal warm-up videos are a challenge for you then you're probably not ready for this yet and that's okay you're not ready for this yet but work on that for a while and when you feel really confident in those if you're a veteran then we can just move on but lastly as tempting as it is to skip the intro and coordination of each lesson please watch them for the first at least two to three go rounds because the introduction and the coordination sections of each lesson really give you a lot of insight into how to do the techniques properly and like maybe 50 of the questions that i see in my comment sections or my youtube inbox are questions that i've answered already thoroughly in the video and i get being impatient and i get like oh why is he explaining so much but you need is stuff you need to know and once you know it then of course you can skip once you know that you know it but be honest with yourself don't it's better to just sit and be slightly bored for a time or two and then get it right than to skip and then be frustrated because you've hit a wall so keeping all that in mind let's begin [Music] just to be clear i'm not teaching you how to breathe better just you can hold notes longer or sustained phrases longer no the better you are at inhaling this technique of rooting the breath that i'm about to teach you you're gonna find that the richer and more powerful your voice will be and also the better your inhale the more instinctive and intuitive the exhale becomes the easier singing feels in general okay so now let's get into how to do it so if you're watching this video then by now you should know that you can direct breath pressure within your body to different places based on where you want to go so for example even though our lungs and our rib cage and diaphragm is all up in here we can still breathe into our belly even though there is no literal lung tissue there but you can get a strong felt sense of breathing into your abdomen you can also breathe direct the breath solely outward to your side ribs i can also breathe into my upper chest it's not something i would necessarily recommend you doing but i can and you can too and it doesn't have to be that loud i do that when i demonstrate but what i want to get into today however is learning how to root the breath and that means bringing the breath all the way down to the pelvis so i'm going to breathe downward imagine if my if my if my core is a tree trunk then the roots would be within my pelvis i'm going to direct the breath downward and this is the thing the evidence of me breathing into my pelvis is not seen in my pelvis it's seen in my torso my tree grows we call this growing the tree at a approach so when i reach down with the breath my body moves up and so what one thing that then again this is more advanced instead of that pear-shaped kind of breathing we learned as vocalists in the beginning now we're getting more of a v-shaped kind of breathing and um i'm i'm just kind of ranting to you here but please feel free to keep going as i'm talking to you don't have to pause and listen but experiment with this i'm going gonna give you a few more directives and a few more suggestions so there's a famous youtuber named elliot hulse and he tells his male uh presumably male uh clients to breathe into their balls it's a much more crass way than i would ordinarily uh word it but it does get the point across pretty clearly and obviously if you have a vagina you would breathe down there and yes boys have penises girls have vaginas and actually these days it can get even more complex than that but the point is i want you to breathe into your genitalia that low think of directing the breath down there and i know it's a crazy notion if you've never heard it before but you want to think of breathing all the way down there and as i reach down as i'm rooting there my core starts to lift and even coarse it a bit and my rib cage opens and my chest broadens now this is another thing your chest is not evil this is like it's gonna be like earth shattering for some of you it's okay if your chest lifts as long as there's more expansion than lift and as long as you're anchored within your pelvis so i'm not saying to do this that's not what i'm advising you to do but if i reach down and if my chest broadens as a result now this now you could work with this so your chest your diaphragm cannot possibly fully release if your chest is not allowed to open and expand your rib cage has to open up okay so let's be clear but this is another thing we're not just breathing into the front of the pelvis you know doing the 360 thing so on the sides we have the hips i want you to try to reach the breath into your hip sockets and into your hip bones i want you to try to reach like deeply direct the breath force see if you can feel the pressure there and again i want you to notice as i reach down with the breath my body's moving up we call that growing the tree if you've already studied with an approach coach if you've done my phase one or phase two programs you're familiar with this already but i reach down and my body moves up so you have breathe into your balls thank you elliot i'm giving you your credit we have breathing to your hips and so you're gonna that's what one thing my breathing coach shares with me a lot and um it's very important it's also an old swedish italian school concept of breathing all the way into the hip sockets it's a very old world classical technique but lastly something you might know if you're like an advanced yoga practitioner or something like that um if you're a yogi is breathe into your coccyx or breathe into your anus breathe into your butt and it sounds really like this is a really weird lesson i know but reach all the way down breath wise some taoist practices literally call it anal breathing i know it's such an attractive concept i know but i'm bringing if i imagine i like to use my imagination when i do this and by using my imagination i don't mean that it's not real but i mean that i'm i'm using a visual aid mentally to help guide the muscular action so i imagine these tendrils these roots coming down and coming down and coming down and the deeper my roots go the higher and the more open my tree grows so my trunk the trunk of my body would literally be the trunk of the tree and then my rib cage would be the root i mean the branches not the roots roots trunk branches so i get more of a v-shaped kind of feel to my body so because i'm breathing length into my body now i'm not just breathing myself wide the more my breath comes down my body comes up and this sets me up to do all kind of fancy things that we're about to do in a second so make sure play with this concept because now i'm gonna show you how to use it and if you cannot do this then you cannot you can't use it so yeah be patient with yourself and replay this part of the video experiment for most people it is a completely foreign concept to breathe down into your pelvis um oh i left one thing out you want to also breathe into your perineum um i'm going to give mike bryant credit for this a fellow approach vocal instructor he referred to it as the runway the space between the anus and the genitalia in the front depending on what your sex is um and it really stuck with a lot of my students say oh i breathe into the runway yes so you have the front you have the back you have the sides and you also have the space in between the runway uh the perineum i want you to try to breathe into that space as well you you want to root front sides back and center as much as you can you want your roots to go deep and it's going to lift you up and open you up okay and i want you to let your body adopt whatever shape that it wants don't breathe don't be afraid of your chest opening if your abdomen moves inward a bit don't freak out again this is advanced i know what what we talked about before with belly breathing this is not that this is this different animal now we're taking it a notch up okay so play with this and let's move on so the most common question that i get when it comes to breathing is like what do i do with it like how do i use it and um like i said before oftentimes you'll find that instinctively you'll just kind of feel what to do but i'm going to give you something a little more precise than that just to help you out so this this is the thing when we breathe down into the pelvis we we um activate this mechanism for for space we open up space within the body we lengthen the spine um and we open the chest and we open the body but then what do we do with this to sing so this is this is the problem i can explain it this way the regular people will do this it's hard to do all this deep breathing and talking like back to back like trying to demonstrate and do it okay so i'm gonna breathe in i can't stay away from you and they'll just everything will collapse and this will collapse so this is the key once i breathe space into my body i can't stay away from you too long i need to keep space and we call this suspension so once i inhale i'm going to exhale again on purpose try not to hyperventilate all this force breathing today i'm going to reach into my pelvis and then i'm gonna keep open as i talk or as i sing now this feels good like having a huff and puff that was wearing me out but now i'm staying open that's the difference between like just normal exhalation and the kind of exhalation for singing the key is to retain the space that you gain from your inhale even as you're making dynamic thus god sounds have them that's not you'll lose so the bible says and it still [Music] you know how to do it so let's begin i want you to stand comfortably you can also sit if you're sitting make sure you're on the bones of your butt if you're standing then just stand so we're going to reach down into the pelvis and grow the tree and exhale with aha let your body melt down this time we're going to let it melt down we're just warming everything up unless when you're ready we're going to inhale again and let it go down with this audible high inhale again i'm talking your breathing reach into the front reach into the hips reach into into the anus and to the perineum into the runway reach into all these places and then exhale let's do two more so we're going to reach into the pelvis feel the trunk narrow and lengthen if i'm going too fast feel free to pause the video at any point take your time or just watch me say it and then pause it and try it it's fine we're two different people with two different breath cycles i'm reaching down into all front sides back and central so i'm gonna i feel my chest lift and broaden i feel my rib cage lift and widen you don't have to close your eyes it helps me but you're kind of looking at me so it's like a thing but anyway so reach down again the more you get the deeper you get those roots the more your tree can grow but remember also like an umbrella we only need to press on one spot um well four spots but or five one two three no four yeah four okay that's not a counting lesson obviously four spots but on one part of your body and that would be your pelvis so we're just breathing it solely into the pelvis and everything else happens as a result just like an umbrella we breathe into the pelvis okay so let's get fancy so bring your awareness to your abs okay just your mental awareness don't don't touch them just bring your mental awareness with your mind's eye go to your abs and you're going to reach into the pelvis on the exhale feel your abs pull in and up it's like kind of like a churning gent gently reaching to the pelvis again feel your abs pull in and up and right now i'm i feel like kind of like a he-man fitness or fit old-timey fitness kind of ad or whatever i'm getting a feeling feeling very v-shaped i may not look it but i'm feeling very v-shaped very coarse i didn't reach down then feel the abs pull you in and up and relax so we rise and then we arrive some more we rise and then we rise some more we rise and then we rise some more let's get into some suspension of the rib cage though so we're going to reach into the pelvis again every any place we can get breathe into your balls i know but hey you won't forget it though breathe into your anus remember anal breathing breathing to your hips that old timey swedish italian school all of these masters knew these weird things so and in a lot of kung fu practices they had perineum power breathed into the space between the penis and the anus the vagina and the anus breathing to that space as well all of this is fair game reach with the breath i'm gonna use the f word force force it and so it's rare that i'll tell you to do this but you can force the breath a little bit down here for now eventually we want to become effortless but force it let's reach down feel the ribs open up and suspend and relax i'm gonna say that again i'm asking you to suspend so we reach down abdomen core lifts ribs open up so when you exhale the ribs so it's kind of stay in place if you feel like this is happening then you're letting go engage a little bit of effort at your size and give you permission to do that engage a little bit more effort to keep those ribs open as you exhale feel the abs still pulling you in it up they're going to help you and keep the ribs out so let's reach into our pelvis and then we and then i let go okay so let's try that one more time catch your breath take a break if you need to i need to okay let's do it again reach down i started feeling move my shoulder blades now and then and relax now if that was hard for you than good it shouldn't be that easy if it's easy for you then do it again play with this it is very important for the video 2 it is extremely important for video 3 so um you have to build upon this and i understand that you're probably going to check out video 2 anyway just out of curiosity but please understand get this at least halfway comfortable before you try to do the stuff in video too it'll help so much more if you can do this first um like i said the stuff in video 2 gets built upon in video 3. so work that out um yeah so that's it let's go to the next one [Music] [Music] is [Music]

Channel: EricArceneaux

Views: 450,645

Keywords: voice lessons, how to sing, vocal workout, voice strengthening, voice building, how to breathe, breathing for singing, qigong, gyrokinesis, yoga, pranayama, aapproach

Id: RMsRo6iR5xQ

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2016