0a.2 Sitting, breathing, and a voice that stays put

What this is and why it exists

Almost every tone problem a beginner has is a breathing problem. The voice is thin, or it wavers, or it runs out halfway through a line. None of those are fixed by singing harder.

How you sit decides how you breathe. A Carnatic singer sits cross-legged on the floor for an hour at a time. That is not ceremony. It keeps the spine upright and leaves the abdomen free, and the abdomen is where the breath comes from.

The vocabulary

• Abdominal breathing — breathing so the abdomen moves and the chest stays still. It is the breath that supports a long phrase.
• Support — steady pressure from below that keeps a note at one pitch until you choose to stop it.
• Strain — the tight feeling in the throat that means stop. It does not build range.
• Sadhakam — practice. Daily, short, and the same every day.
• Akaara — the open vowel aa, which the next lesson uses.

The mental model

The throat is not the engine. It is the valve. The engine is below your ribs, and the throat only shapes what the engine sends.

A singer who has understood this stops pushing from the neck. The note gets louder from below and steadier from below, and the throat is left alone to make the sound. A singer who has not understood it pushes from the throat, gets a bright note for a few minutes, and loses the next three days.

Sitting upright is what lets the engine work. Slumping folds the abdomen and the breath moves up into the chest. A chest breath is short, and you can hear that it is short.

The work

1. Sit upright. Cross-legged on the floor, or on a chair with both feet flat.
2. Let your shoulders drop. Raised shoulders pull the breath into the chest.
3. Put one hand flat on your abdomen.
4. Breathe in slowly. The hand should move outward. Your chest should stay still.
5. Breathe out slowly and evenly, with no sound.
6. Repeat five times, then start the drone.
7. Sing sa for as long as the breath lasts. Count the seconds in your head.
8. Listen for the note sagging at the end. That is the breath running out.
9. Rest, then repeat three times.
10. Stop the moment your throat feels tight.

What you should now be able to explain or do

Sit so that your abdomen is free and your shoulders are down. Take a breath that moves the abdomen and not the chest. Hold one steady note for the length of that breath, without the pitch sagging. Say what strain feels like and what to do about it.

Check yourself