running out of breath on solo study 2 -2.1... any tips?
Im trying to finish up solo study 2 but I am always running out of breath. I exhale all I can before starting and the farthest I ever got was to the last three 1 draws which I had to use my cheeks to suck in and unavoidably bent the notes. Any tips?
There are some forum questions about this, in the Winslow Yerxa forum he added a couple of answers in which he described a process to detect whether this is the case or not and how to fix it.
Usually what happens is your nose is not closed so during draw notes you are letting too much air in, that then you need to get out somehow in a short time etc. At a reasonable tempo for those exercises, you shouldn't be running into problems if your technique is good. How do I know? I had this same issue and i don't have it anymore since I figured out how to properly close my nose on inhales.
A typical exercise is to try long draw notes (1 draw and 2 draw are typical ones which for some reason are usually problematic). If you can't hold it at least 30 seconds, you either have breathing problems (lungs) or your technique is not developed and you are inhaling through your nose. Try pinching your nose and see if you can hold long notes in that case. If you can while pinching your nose but not while not doing it, that's there issue you need to work on.
You can't blow up an balloon with air leaking through your nose. If you've blown up balloons before withoutsignificant trouble, you already know how to block access to your nasal passages at the back of the roof of your mouth - there's a fleshy bit that wags up to block it.
Try closing your mouth with lips together, and trying to exhale. If your nasal passages are closed your cheeks will puff out because the air has nowhere to go.
And if you try to inhale with your mouth closed, your cheeks will suck in.
if you can do these two things, you can do them with your lips apart and with a harmonica in your mouth.
Ok thank you everyone for the advice. Now I have a game plan and a couple new skills to practice. Thank you!
I have tried playing ex 2.1 without using the nose push and it's actually also easily doable just by keeping my nose well closed. So you might want to focus on mmarquez and Winslow's advices before you dig into the nose push.
However, just to give you an idea, with the nose push I can play all first 4 bars and end up with less air than when I started (or more air, depending on how you see it... more room for air let's say)
You'll have to learn how to exhale through your nose while playing a blow note, thereby exhaling both through your mouth (playing the note) and your nose, allowing to get rid of a lot of air. After that blow note, you have to "close" your nose again for the draw ones.
This technique (Joe Filisko calls it "the nose push") takes a bit of time to learn a quite a lot to really master but it is very useful for Blues as we mainly play in second position, which uses a very high percentage of draw notes. You'll find yourself in that situation where you're filling with air quite often as you go on.
There are other ways you can prevent that and they are all tought as well as the nose push in that lesson about breathing on the harmonica, here on the website: https://www.bluesharmonica.com/lessons/breathing_harmonica
But for solo harmonica study 2 ex. 2.1, I don't think there is a choice, the nose push is required. Ex. 2.2 is a bit easier to play in that aspect because there are more blow notes. I learned that one first actually, as I was starting to incorporate the nose push. I came back to 2.1 later because I thought it probably wasn't the best example to practice it, you're filling with air so much that it's hard to control the push. Now it's not a problem at all anymore, it's quite impressive how much air we can exhale through our nose.