Dave Wirth
"You never breathe when you are thinking."
I have this face... a thinking face. I think so hard that I sit extremely still and my eyebrows furrow. And the news to me is that I don't breathe. Hmmm...
What about guitar? Do I hold my breath when I play guitar? Until recently, yes. Lead guitar, especially. I noticed that I would take a deep breath as I started to play, but sooner or later I would desperately need oxygen. I would breathe a shallow breath to kindof, sortof make up for it.
In the grand tradition of nerdiness, I ran an informal experiment on the effects of deep breathing on my guitar playing.
I started by breathing deeply while I practiced a passage that was hard for me to do. Here is the result: I noticed that I messed up every single time I took a big deep breath, as opposed to a shallow one. However, I noticed that the tension was gone when I breathed deeply. When I played without deep breathing, the enemy marched on... tension.
My hypothesis: Taking deep breaths destroys tension, and whatever technique was built on it. Therefore, playing and breathing deeply at the same time will change your relationship to the guitar profoundly.
Could it be that simple? Just take deep breaths? I think it is.
We can cling to tension that we don't need by holding onto our breaths and breathing shallowly as needed. But the brain needs oxygen. That much is obvious.
Yes, taking some deeper breaths means we will mess-up more than we like. What to do about this? Let the mistakes be. I have a strong hunch that they will absolutely work themselves out of the picture in time.
