Teaching Breathing Via Online Voice Lessons

In the age of online voice lessons, I've had to change my teaching methods in order to help my beginning voice students understand how to breathe for singing.  How you breathe and how you regulate the airflow is perhaps the most important factor for good singing.  Here are some warmups I'm using a lot for my voice students.

1) In order to help my voice students practice, I've create recordings for every student to help practice at home.  While I've always made recordings for songs for practice purposes, creating vocal exercises to practice at home has been a new and educational experience.  It has forced me as a voice teacher to become much more clear on my instructions when the voice student is not in the same room and relies mostly on my voice to guide them through exercises.

2) I'm relying more than ever on creating vocal warmups that have some sort of feedback for students to learn from.  For breathing, I've asked my voice students to use the old stand-by...lay on the floor with a heavy object on your stomach, and then practice your breathing using counts to keep the airflow regulated and consistent. 

3) In a typical in-person voice lesson, I can easily see when a student is breathing poorly.  Due to the limitations of camera setups, that is not always possible online.  I'm using my ears a LOT MORE to figure out when and where students need help with breathe on certain musical phrases.

4) Feedback from my students is essential.  In a voice lesson, I always ask my students how a certain phrase or pitch felt.  By getting a voice student's own physical feedback, I can typically diagnose vocal problems.  This feedback has become essential for online voice lessons.  The vocal cues of technical problems are more subtle online, and so hearing my voice student's own description of the problem is vital.  A voice student once said I sounded like a doctor in voice lessons because I was always asking "How did that pitch or phrase make you feel?"  I feel like a doctor all the time now because I am so reliant on hearing how my voice students feel.

Please stay safe out there and keeping singing!