I recently got a question from Justin asking about a breathing technique, endorsed by some great trumpet players like Bobby Shew and Roger Ingram, called “wedge breathing.” I was familiar with the concept, but I’d never really seriously tried it. I did some research to learn more about it and spent the last week practicing it and trying to get more comfortable with it. Keep in mind that the following perspective is only one week’s worth of practice, but I think I’ve got the general feel of it now and have some observations I can share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, what exactly is wedge breathing? Here is the basic gist as I understand it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
While the audio quality isn’t so good, I recommend you watch Roger Ingram discuss wedge breathing to get both a visual idea and also hear this technique in action (part 1<\/a>, part 2<\/a>). It might be a little tricky for you to get all the different steps of it working smoothly together at first. Try practicing this breathing technique away from your instrument to familiarize yourself with it. Over time, you should be able to blend all the separate parts into one smooth motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Overall, I really don’t recommend that brass player’s adopt wedge breathing as their normal approach, but I think it has some good use as a practice exercise to help make high register breathing more efficient. It’s common to think of blowing “more air” for the upper register, but it actually takes less air to play in the high range. Taking in a comfortably full breath allows us to start blowing simply by relaxing, a very natural process that’s great for brass playing. Unfortunately, taking in such a large breath for the upper register can lead to overblowing and excessive tension. Wedge breathing essentially forces you to take in a bit less air and the combination of keeping your abdomen firm and the raised shoulders gives you a very similar feeling of blowing simply by relaxing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spending some regular time working on wedge breathing could be useful for players to get familiar with some breathing sensations that are helpful for the upper register and maybe even for use in certain performance situations. In general, however, I think it’s better to allow the abdomen to expand when inhaling. It’s probably fine to allow the shoulders to raise when taking a very full breath, just keep in mind that you don’t need to blow a lot of air in the upper register and will need to compensate according to the range and length of the phrase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Try it out for a while and see what you think. Let us know your own thoughts and observations in the comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently got a question from Justin asking about a breathing technique, endorsed by some great trumpet players like Bobby Shew and Roger Ingram, called “wedge breathing.” I was familiar with the concept, but I’d never really seriously tried it. I did some research to learn more about it and spent the last week practicing … Continue reading Wedge Breathing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15350306,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1362,1363,1385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brass","category-breathing","category-practice"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peFHCc-Dg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15350306"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8002,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434\/revisions\/8002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}