I received an email today from Jimi Lee promoting his skype coaching lessons, the first paragraph got my attention.
'I teach breathing from the glottis rather than the diaphragm, which causes most players to have an amazing improvement in tone during the first session. Besides great tone, my breathing technique makes bending easy.'
I am interested to know what other people make of this statement.
I have always made a conscious effort to breath from my diaphram when playing to try to get a big tone, but I think that I am using my glottis at the same time.
Last Edited by on Apr 28, 2011 3:13 PM
When I first read Jimi Lee's statement I thought I night have been missing a trick, but now I know what he means.
After thinking about it I have realised that I use my glottis a lot when playing, for bending, vibrato, articulating notes and drawing on long single notes.
Before I became a perfusionist, I was a respiratory therapist. It can take weeks for a patient to build back enough muscle to be able to be weaned off a ventilator. I know I thing or two about lungs and breathing muscles.
I've also been learning to sing for almost two years - the first six months of which were focused on technique which is 90 per cent breathing.
For what it's worth...
"Breathing" from the glottis is not accurate. Your glottis is in your pharynx. You can change the shape of your pharynx but that doesn't mean it's pulling in any air.
"Breathing from your diaphragm" is also a little inaccurate. We all pull in air with our diaphragm. We all have accessory muscles which kick in when we are short of breath and need to huff and puff. Long story short, using those accessory muscles don't help you sing. In fact, they make you sing worse. So the term "Breathing from your diaphragm" means breathing using *only* your diaphragm.
As far as this pertains to the harmonica, (and I'm no expert - this is my opinion) there are two topics that cover this ground; intonation and vibrato.
We need to modify the airflow to bend notes and the way we do that, the way we hit notes using that modified airflow changes our intonation. You tend to get a richer tone if you intonate by modifying the airflow from as far back in your mouth or pharyx as you can.
Vibrato is a pulsing of your airflow which can be generated by your diaphragm (ex: Sonny Boy Williamson II) throat (ex: Paul Butterfield) or your mouth (ex: Buddha made a few videos on vibrato where he "puts a waggle" on the airflow with his cheeks) But the difference here is that vibrato is a modification or interruption of airflow, not the actual breathing action.
So to sum up, I don't have any idea what "breathing from the glottis rather than the diaphragm" means.
I suspect that Jimmy Lee's "breathing from the glottis" suggestion gets players consciously pulling and pushing air from deeper in the oral cavity which actually may get them using the diaphragm more effectively.
Diaphragmatic air production requires more than just producing airflow from the gut. There's' a lot that has to on with the embouchure, air aperture, oral resonance chamber and airway in order for diaphragmatic air production to work effectively for harp playing. when you do it right it almost feels like there is a direct connection between your diaphragm and the reeds linked by a column of air.
Arzajack - first of all thank you for an informed post with facts and explicit terminology that should help all of us communicate more effectively.
However I disagree with one of your statements: "Vibrato is a pulsing of your airflow..." Vibrato isn't a physiological function - it is a well defined musical term. Vibrato is in fact a back-and-forth variation in PITCH of a note - the most obvious example being the violin player who wiggles the wrist causing the finger to roll over the string lengthwise, changing the pitch up and down from the center point. Vibrato can be achieved on harp as well. Merely pulsing one's airflow causes a variation in VOLUME, not pitch. Technically this is called TREMELO. Many if not most harp players do this - it is relatively easy. AND many harp players refer to this as vibrato. But in order for us to have a substantive discussion we need to be clear about the difference between vibrato and tremelo so I hope we can move forward with the definition I offer.
With that said this might help others discover throat vibrato:
Although I learned to get vibrato first using my tongue, (and I get tremelo with my diaphragm and throat) I am now just discovering and working on "throat" vibrato. I've found that by placing my tongue in position where I'm right on the edge of a bend but not yet bending, and then pulsing my breath by using throat constriction, I can ALSO get vibrato. It is very different from the tongue-only technique, and indeed has a wonderful tone. The tongue is definitely involved but I am not actually varying the bend with the tongue the way I started - the pitch is magically varying with what I'm doing with my throat, even though tongue position is critical to allowing it to happen. I've only recently discovered this so I'm pretty focused on it. ---------- /Greg
Last Edited by on Apr 29, 2011 2:08 AM
