The euphonium and trombone are wind instruments. Unsurprisingly, a wind instrument needs a steady supply of wind in order to make sounds.
Three breathing techniques pertain to the these instruments: Normal breathing, quick short breaths, and circular breathing. We use each of these in different musical contexts.
Staggered breathing is an ensemble-playing technique for situations when the section must sustain a note for a long time, or when a moving passage is too long to play in one breath.
Nearly always, we breathe normally when playing. Quick short breaths and circular breathing are only needed in certain situations.
In the context of playing a wind instrument, “normal breathing” doesn’t literally mean “breathe as you normally do when walking around.”
We need to take in enough air to sustain a strong air stream. We need to do that in a way that isn’t noisy, uncomfortable, or tiring.
Our breathing isn’t part of the music we’re playing, so we don’t want to distract the audience by making it obvious. You’ve probably heard players who make a loud sucking noise when they inhale. That isn’t necessary or desirable.
Our lungs are our bodies’ containers for air. That’s why people talk about increasing our lung capacity. With larger lungs, we can take in and hold more air…or so the reasoning goes.
The problem with this idea is that the size of our lungs is more-or-less fixed. They are inside a frame - the ribcage. We can’t really increase the capacity of our lungs through breathing exercises any more than we can make our arms longer by lifting weights.
But we can improve the strength and the neuromuscular connections of the muscles that control our breathing - the diaphragm. Just as we build muscle tone and strength in our arms by lifting weights (without making our arms longer), we can build muscle tone and strength in our diaphragm (without making our lungs bigger).
It’s also possible to do exercises that enable the ribcage to stretch a bit more. This enables the lungs to expand a little further, although they don’t actually grow larger.
This video by Dr. Mandell demonstrates a couple of simple exercises that help increase your body’s ability to pull air into the lungs:
Dr. Mandell breathing exercises
Those of you who practice martial arts will recognize the first of Dr. Mandell’s exercises as similar to tao breathing exercises or tai chi exercises. Here’s a short video that demonstrates several useful breathing exercises from that tradition:
Tao breathing has an additional benefit - it helps alleviate stress and tension, and helps us relax. That’s directly applicable to playing an instrument.
Most people give little thought to how they breathe. The body automatically inhales and exhales so it won’t drop dead on the spot, and we just take it for granted.
But if we want to control our air stream with our diaphragm, we need to breathe in a certain way, known as diaphragmatic breathing.
This video by nurse Michelle Kenway demonstrates a simple exercise to improve our diaphragmatic breathing:
Diaphragmatic breathing exercises
The benefits of diaphragmatic breathing include better control of our air stream for playing our instrument and the relief of tension or anxiety, which is also helpful for our playing.
The music we’re playing won’t pause and wait for us to breathe. We need to learn to pull in a good supply of air quickly and quietly and immediately push the air into our instrument.
Musicians have found that by opening the mouth in an O shape we can quickly fill our lungs. We can also inhale through the nose, or through both the nose and mouth simultaneously.
The key thing is to pull the air in quickly and quietly and engage the instrument right away. We don’t want to hold the air and then start playing. That makes it harder to control the attack.
Good breathing technique overlaps with other techniques for playing. Our instrument will not be in contact with our lips while we inhale. Therfore, we need to cultivate the skill of hearing the next note we intend to play in our minds.
We also need to start that note accurately and cleanly without depending on any contact with the mouthpiece and with no time to adjust our embouchure to produce the correct pitch. For that, we need good embouchure development.
The videos and other resources you may find that explain breathing exercises don’t assume you will put the air to any particular use when you exhale. You’re just expelling it from your lungs. So it doesn’t matter much exactly how you exhale.
For our purposes, we need to control the air stream when we exhale. We have to support the musical sounds we are producing. To that end, it’s useful to think about pushing downward with the diaphragm as we exhale. This seems to help keep the air flow steady and consistent while it lasts.
This video by Tim Weir of Box Hill Institute explains effective breathing technique step by step:
How to breathe for brass playing
Here are some breathing exercises devised specifically for wind musicians from Michael Moore, principal Tubist with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra:
Trombone Dion Tucker offers advice on how to achieve a good sound, including advice on breathing. He makes an interesting point about staying out of your own way. What he’s getting at is to avoid overthinking or over-straining to fill up with air.
Your body is already designed to breathe in and out. We just need to control the process so we can use the air to play an instrument.
Dion Tucker on getting a great sound
At one point in the video, Dion places his right hand on his diaphragm while he plays a long tone. This is easy with the trombone, thanks to the way the instrument is balanced on top of the left hand.
When we want to try this with the euphonium, we immediately understand the value of supporting the instrument entirely with our left arm. Our right hand should be completely relaxed.
If we’re seated, we don’t want to achieve this by resting the instrument on our lap, because doing so folds our airway. Try it in a standing position instead.
Placing our right hand on our diaphragm should have no effect at all on our ability to play any open note on the euphonium, regardless of the type or model of euphonium we’re playing. So, this is an area where posture and breathing technique overlap.
If you want to have a little fun with breathing exercises, try the exercises Sam Pilafian and Patrick Sheridan demonstrate in this video:
Some music contains extended sections in which we must play a series of notes with no breaks in between. When we are playing in a marcato, staccato, leggiero, or secco style, it’s possible to grab small breaths after every note or after every few notes. We’re taking advantage of the very brief spaces bewteen the notes.
This technique is very common for tuba players, and also comes in handy for euphonium and trombone at times.
In this video, renowned euphoniumist David Werden demonstrates a practice technique to develop the skill of grabbing a quick, short breath.
How to practice quick/tricky breaths
The quick breath is almost the same as a normal breath, except that we don’t have time to fill up completely. We’re grabbing a little air, and we may have to repeat that many times in the course of playing a longer passage.
Circular breathing is a way to give the impression of continuous playing without pausing to inhale. We do it by collecting air in our cheeks and squeezing that air into the mouthpiece while inhaling through our nose.
Some people consider circular breathing to be a “trick” or “stunt” and not a basic breathing technique for normal playing. That may be true to an extent, and yet there are situations when it is useful.
An obvious issue is that when we puff up our cheeks with air, we lose precision with our embouchure. Some players seem able to pick up circular breathing fairly easily, but for most of us it requires a lot of practice.
The quality of our tone when we take a breath is very different - much worse - than our normal tone. It takes time and effort to overcome that problem.
You’ve seen players who puff out their cheeks even when they play normally - Dizzy Gillespie, Trombone Shorty, and others. They have reached a high level of skill despite doing this, not because of it.
Gillespie is on record as saying he knew this was incorrect technique and he did not recommend that younger players emulate it.
But for circular breathing, we intentionally fill our cheeks with air so that we have an air supply available to keep the sound going while we sneak in a quick breath.
Here are some instructional videos showing how to learn circular breathing:
Tony Tortora, Tutorial on circular breathing
Ethan Nylander, How to circular breathe
Earspasm, Learn how to circular breathe in 10 minutes
For an example of how circular breathing sounds when it’s done well, here’s a recording of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis performing Niccolò Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo. Unlike any other recording I’ve heard of a wind musician playing this piece, this version is not overdubbed. Marsalis played it just as we hear it.
Circular breathing may or may not come naturally to you. In my case, I struggled with it until one day I was running out of air at the end of a solo passage in a band piece during a concert. Since the last note of the solo was going to be ruined anyway, I tried a circular breath. It worked, and I didn’t ruin the solo. That was the first time I did it successfully. It goes to show fear can be a motivator.
Staggered breathing is a section technique more than an individual technique. It isn’t a different way of breathing, but is based on normal breathing.
Most people say staggered breathing only means the section members take turns breathing, and leave it at that; but there’s a little more involved in doing it well.
As a section member, you must try and blend your sound with the other players’ sounds so that the audience can’t tell when one of you is taking a breath.
It’s also necessary to drop and and re-join the section in a way that isn’t obvious to the audience. That means starting each note with no articulation; with a breath attack.
When it’s your turn to breathe, you fade out while another player fades in to join the section sound. The dovetailed dynamics help conceal the fact that anyone is pausing to inhale.
Effective staggered breathing involves multiple skills. A clean, precise breath attack requires good embouchure development. A blended sound requires attentive listening and adaptation to the section and ensemble. Your personal concept of the instrument can’t deviate so far from generally-accepted norms that your sound “sticks out.” All players must be exactly in tune with each other.
So, there are several details to master to perform staggered breathing effectively. It usually requires section rehearsals, and must be revisited with each personnel change in the section.