Circular Breathing

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Circular Breathing

Does anyone know how to do circular breathing? My teacher doesn't, nor does anyone else in the band (some think they do, but after demonstration it was clear that they were mistaken). If someone could send me some advice, preferably within 24 hours, I would much appreciate it. I'm going abroad for a music festival and it would help greatly.

Circular breathing is a four step process.

allow your cheeks to inflate with air during normal playing.
once they have inflated sufficiently, cut of the air stream in the back of you mouth with your tongue
simultaneously inhale (quickly!) through your nose and use tension of your cheek muscles to force air through your embouchure.
after a full breath has been taken through the nose, release the tongue in the back of the mouth and exhale as usual.

I can tell you now, you will not learn this technique in any twenty four hours. It is a very extended technique and is so rarely required that its value is almost nil. You would do much better to spend your time on other things. Circular breathing is sort of icing on the "Technique Cake". Don't waste your effort on it until you have the time to waste.

Folks, has nobody been listening? Did Rachel Harvey not just post an eloquent plea for teachers not to tell students they can't or shouldn't do things, or to tell them anything is too hard?
Circular breathing CAN be learned, it can be learned quickly, and it can be learned by young people. It can come in handy, and anybody motivated to figure it out ought to give it a shot. I learned it in about a week--a highly motivated week--in seventh grade, just because I was bored. At the time I thought of it as a trick. I didn't have any practical use for it until college, but by then I'd mastered it to the point that I was comfortable using it on the spur of the moment, in a performance. Learning it young was ideal for me.
Since then, the ability has gotten me out of many symphonic scrapes. Note that circular breathing is VERY tiring for the chops, so if you have a chance to breathe the usual way and get the metal off your face, you're much better off doing so. In other words, it is not as useful for avoiding breaths between notes as for getting through impossibly long notes. However, if you have the technique MASTERED, it's also helpful for getting a quick breath in the middle of a long phrase.
The methods previously described will give you the basic idea. I would suggest these steps to learning. Don't use a horn or mouthpiece for now.

Learn to buzz with nothing but cheek and tongue pressure: inflate cheeks, form embouchure, expel air with cheeks. Work on this to produce a decent little buzz---don't expect it to last long. Kids do this without a second thought just to make the noise.
Do this buzzette while breathing in and out normally through your nose. Get used to the independence of the buzzette from everything else.
Next try to coordinate the two: buzzette and nose-inhale simultaneously.
Next do a buzzette and nose-inhale and then do a quick transition into exhaling for a normal buzz.
Once you've got that working, try going from normal buzz to buzzette.
After you have that figured out, try going from normal buzz to buzzette, nose-inhale, and then exhale-buzz.

Once you've got that sequence established, you have all the basic mechanics of circular breathing. NOW you may take out your horn. (Don't try a mouthpiece-only phase; it's ridiculously hard. The horn will help you.) Promise me you won't worry about how godawful you sound in the next steps before proceeding.

With the horn, start over again from step 1. Master each step in turn. Once you've gotten to step 6, with the mechanics working all right, you may now proceed to step 8 and worrying about musical matters.
Practice infinitely long tones, mf, first line G, using circular breathing. Work on getting your breath without scooping the tone, making little strangling noises, or letting the note get interrupted.
Continue up the scale this way. Get up to high G. Then start working downward to low G. I wouldn't recommend attempting to circular breathe outside this range.
. Work on different dynamic levels. Again, watch out for bumps on scoops.

The following are harder but all quite possible: louder, lower, while slurring, while tonguing.

Circular breathing..... I looked it up on the net and it said something about puffing your cheeks while you do it. I was always taught that that was a bad thing to do while playing horn, so I E-mailed the man who had put the page together and asked him this...

I was reading about the Didjeridoo and circular breathing, and I was wondering if it would be possible to learn circular breathing with out puffing your cheeks out.

This was his reply.............

It depends on how little air [you] require to sustain a note, which is something you can always improve on with practice. [If] you needed very little air to sustain a tone, then you would need to utilize a relatively small mouth/throat volume, and perhaps wouldn't need to "puff" your cheeks out. The process of using less and less air is the second step in learning the didj, just after learning how to make the basic "buzz", and it's important enough that one should spend some time on it.
The bottom line is that you need a certain amount/volume of air to sustain the tone long enough for you to replenish your lungs, with some reserve for mistakes. And that volume needs to come from cavities in your mouth and throat that you can ]identify] and [learn to control]. So the first step must be to learn how to sustain a tone with ever decreasing amounts of air.
I've tried it with the trumpet and it's enough harder than the didj (because the air pressure required is greater) that I can't do it yet. I recall from playing the French horn years ago that it was slightly harder than the trumpet.
Part of the difficulty is that you need to maintain control of your embouchure while using your lips and cheeks much differently--letting them expand and contract. So you can no longer use the "set" of the rest of your mouth to support the shape of your lips, because the rest of your mouth is in motion, with a different agenda, ie supplying a constant [pressure] of air to sustain the tone. Learning the technique is so interesting because you must unlearn so much of what you have done automatically all your life.
I think it's possible, but you'll have to work at it. And I think you'll be restricted to pp and p volume passages. I'd also suggest practicing the technique on an instrument that required less pressure and volume than the F. horn, and then transferring the technique once it's learned. I've heard of some sax players and I think a trumpet player or two, so someone's done it.

I would like to learn how to do it also. But can anyone tell me how useful it is. I know from my personal experiences that we as horn players are required to play excessively long notes, as do oboe players. I know many many oboe players that are required to learn this difficult skill. They tell me their teachers made them learn by blowing air through a straw into a glass of water. any info would help. thatnks. Darrel

I learned to circular breathe while studying digeredu! Really... You can start with a straw in a glass of water. Try to make a buzz while pushing the air from your mouth with your tongue - but not blowing the air through the throat - we've all done this as kids, just hard to explain.
This way, your throat is closed to the mouth and you can breathe in at the same time through your nose. It's like a "doink" sound for lack of another way to express it! )
The next step it to graduate to something larger - I found it was "relatively" easy on a piece of tube about the size of a waxpaper roll - we used golf tubes for our beginning digeredus, then graduated to PCV pipe. ( a digeredu is an Australian aboriginal inst. made from the trunk of a small hollowed out tree. They make amazing sounds on it.) You also puff out your cheeks so you have enough air to squeeze out and keep the buzz going while you take quick sniffs in through your nose. I also found it was easier during the 1st 3rd of the breathing out process. If I waited too long to tank up, it was too late.
It was harder for me to do on the horn, and I confess I have probably let the skill slip since, but if trumpet players can do it, we certainly can!

There is a book on circular breathing by Robert Dick. This technique may take quite a while to learn. Dick reported over a year for him. Arkady Shilkloper took over a couple of years, he told me. I am still working up the nerve to start learning myself. Ron Klimko, bassoonist and colleague of mine learned how to pull it off in less than a year, but he is still perfecting full control.
In short, you have to learn to inhale through your nostrils while 'exhaling' using your cheeks. It seems a quickish sort of 'puff' action is what most people use. The cheek exhale is not long in duration, in other words. It's tricky. I have managed the technique without playing an instrument; when I get my horn up to my lips many years of strongly inculcated breathing habits take over, and I can't seem to make it work. There is, evidentally, a bit of an 'Ah Ha!' factor; the day comes along after months of failures and near misses, when you suddenly do it, almost accidentally, and then you are on the road to mastery.

There may be a Santa Claus, but there are no quick fixes for the art of horn playing. I'm sorry to say that while the concept of circular breathing may be explained quickly, it takes a long period of practice to perfect (if ever - some never do). Let me be the first to say I cannot do it.

The concept is to fill your oral cavity with enough air to provide a constant airstream to the horn while you quickly breathe in through the nose to fill your lungs. I know that this sounds simple, but it is very difficult to control pitch, volume and tone while doing this, especially when you change from the air stored in your cheeks back to the air in your lungs. There are almost always bumps or "hitches" that interrupt your airstream.

I'm sure there are hornlisters out there who can circular breathe, and I'm sure that they will provide you much better information than I have - but I'm sure the first thing they will say is that it must be practiced to be perfected. I would also say that unless all other aspects of your playing are exactly where you want them to be, you might spend your time working on them. It'll pay off better in the long run.

Congratulations on having the chance to go overseas. I hope that it turns out to be a pleasurable and memorable time.

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