| Mild asthma, sleep apnea, and nasty allergies makes summer playing a ritual of torture for me at times. Some nights I get done playing feeling like I've just run a marathon.
But the funny thing is, having to learn to deal with this had created an interesting dichotomy for me: Breathing has become both my greatest strength and my greatest weakness.
Just as Chuck said, when I'm breathing correctly, I usually can play markedly longer than my peers. As I quipped in my fireworks post, other trumpet players have called me submarine becuase on long passages they just keep waiting for me to come up for air. When my breathing is working, I can really fill up a room and manage the upper registers just fine.
Unfortunately, I have to prepare myself or I can really struggle. I cannot over eat before I play, I need to make sure I'm well rested (big issue considering the apnea), and I need to be sure to pace myself or I can struggle. If anything affects my breathing -- excessive humidity, asthma attack, allergies, fatigue, or simply lack of focus, my sound goes to pot.
My biggest problem otherwise is confidence. I'm often so insecure or worried about getting jsut the right sound that I choke off my tone. With groups I'm familiar with this is not a problem, but in a new setting I all too often sound like crap becuase I hold everything in. Once I do that, the breath support suffers and it's a downward spiral. Don't know the answer to it yet, other than to simply relax and play what's in your head. Let the director tell me to be quiter -- if he/she has to tell me to play louder, I consider it a bad sign...
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There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who do not. |