Depends on the music.tredonme wrote:Is it appropriate to make the breath mark longer say over a full beat or even two beats to fill up?
There are two requirements in playing a tuba: 1.) take in enough air to always make a good tone at the proper dynamic, and 2.) play musically. Figuring out where these competing requirements intersect is one of the great challenges.
I breathe twice as often as many others with whom I play--maybe three times as often. And it's still not enough, or not early enough in the phrases. The more often you inhale, the less you have to inhale to stay topped up. The problem is when you try to reach for the whole phrase, deplete yourself into the red zone, and then you really don't have time to get a full refill. So you only fill up halfway, and the cycle repeats. You end up working in the bottom half of your capacity, instead of the top half.
Mike Sanders gave a master class at the Army Conference a couple of years ago. He instructed one of his test subjects to breathe in the middle of a phrase with a short breath at a particular spot. The guy was able to play the whole phrase without the breath, but only with full depletion. Mike said that when you let yourself get all the way empty, it really takes a lot of work to refill. Better to keep topped up than to put yourself in that position. He said you often needed a whole measure to properly refill after full depletion.
Now, knowing all that, you'd think I'd be better at it. You'd be wrong.
Hyperventilation is a separate issue, and actually a sign that you are moving a lot of air in and out. One solution is to rebreathe--take in every other breath through the instrument. That decreases the oxygen content and forestalls hyperventilation to some extent.
Rick "who knows what depletion feels like" Denney
