Circular breathing is a special breathing technique used by musicians to play very long uninterrupted notes on a wind instrument.

Normally, the longest duration of a note on a wind instrument corresponds to one lung filling. After that, willy-nilly, you have to take a breath, and this causes the tone to break off on almost all wind instruments (except the harmonica)!

With circular breathing, however, you are able to build up a certain supply of air in your throat and mouth and let it flow into your mouthpiece while simultaneously breathing in through your nose.

This sounds terribly complicated - but it is not at all. With about 10 minutes of practice daily, you can teach yourself circular breathing!

You will benefit so comprehensively from practicing circular breathing for your entire game that it is best to start as early as possible!

Circular breathing is rarely used, and whether it is musically very interesting to sustain a note for a few minutes could be debated at length. However, it should be noted that the audience can always be greatly impressed with it! And this with something that is actually very simple!

 

Learning to breathe circularly has quite other crucial advantages. A very important one is that of learning about breathing and its importance in the first place.

Many textbooks write about diaphragmatic breathing, thoracic breathing, and so on. But I could hardly imagine anything about it, and even less was I able to pay attention to how I breathe now while playing. After all, I've been breathing since the beginning of my life, and most of the time without knowing it!

 

This is of course very good, because otherwise I would not be alive. But for playing a wind instrument this is not sufficient. Circular breathing requires very strong diaphragmatic breathing and lets the wind player feel well how this diaphragmatic breathing works. This, in turn, generally improves breathing and thus directly improves the sound and its evenness.

 

The real issue is not circular breathing per se or learning it. This breathing technique can be learned in a very short time. The challenge is "switching" from blowing out the air supply in the mouth to blowing out the air in the lungs. It is at this point, especially when you have a mouthpiece "in your mouth" as is the case with the saxophone, that the embouchure changes greatly and the airflow fluctuates. This leads to pitch fluctuations and various other unpleasant sound changes. But this is a great learning opportunity to stabilize and continuously improve your embouchure.