How Do I Sing from my diaphragm?

It's easy to get buried under the mountain of clichés about singing.  Many of them are complete nonsense, others are downright dangerous, and a few have a shred of truth hidden behind absurd language.  Undeniably, the most common cliché is "sing from the diaphragm."   This monster takes a few other forms like "sing from the stomach" and "don't sing from the throat."

the diaphragm during inhaling and exhaling

To figure out whether this particular cliché is actually helpful advice or complete nonsense, let's start with what the diaphragm isn't.  It definitely isn't your stomach.  It doesn't produce pitch and won't hold air; you can't sing from it nor can you breathe into it.

What it is: a sheet of muscle that divides your chest cavity from your abdominal cavity.  It's convex (like a dome) when relaxed and, when you breath in, it contracts and flattens out allowing more space for the lungs to expand and fill with air.  When you exhale, the diaphragm returns to its normal state underneath the lungs.  Pretty simple really. 

But I hate to say it: some of the people out there slinging vocal tips don't understand even this much.  They talk about using the diaphragm like you're supposed to "squeeze" it to push the air out as you sing.  If a voice instructor talks like this to you -- run.  The diaphragm does not contract to expel air; when the diaphragm contracts, that's when it flattens out to allow a greater volume of air to be inhaled. 

Slightly more educated vocal instructors make the claim that by keeping the diaphragm contracted during singing, you can (and must!) consciously resist breath from being exhaled all at once.  (Though if that were true, why is it that non-singers don't seem to exhale all their breath at once when talking?  Hm.)  Or that you must do this to keep the pressure from building up at the vocal cords.  Or they emphatically insist that you must 'support' your tone with the diaphragm; like the air in your lungs is going to fizzle out uselessly if you don't do something magical with the diaphragm.  And, I kid you not, these same instructors will ask you to bear down and squeeze in an effort to help keep the diaphragm contracted while singing.  Yikes.

Whether that is even scientifically sound (questionable) and viable as a technique (useless) is one thing, but I can't imagine many things more destructive to developing freedom and beauty in the singing voice than bearing down and squeezing.

Rest assured you can throw that advice out the window; don't even bother to look in the rear-view.

So now that we know the "sing from the diaphragm" stuff is nonsense at best, and very bad advice at worst, is there any shred of truth in it?  Well, no, there's no shred of truth there: singing from the diaphragm is entirely mumbo-jumbo; but while we're talking indirectly about the breathing mechanism, I may as well mention that it is important to get a good breath before you sing.  The voice is driven by air, after all. And while the physical action there is driven by the intercostals, abdominals, the aforementioned action of the diaphragm and the basic physics of pressure difference, breathing for singing is really not much more complicated than this: Take a good breath before you sing, a deep one, a relaxed one (don't hyperventilate on me!).  And that's pretty much it.

Further, it is important to understand that you need extraordinary breath control to be an artful singer; to deliver ethereal pianissimo phrases or blustering forte passages, you need to be able to control how much breath pressure you exert in a phrase.  This has nothing to do with "singing from the diaphragm", mind you, but fine breath control is indeed a learned and practiced skill.  And for this, breath control exercises are great!   

In my Vibrato Workshop you'll find some of my favorite breathing exercises that will help you learn to maximize your control over breath, helping you deliver brilliantly sculpted dynamics on your phrases, sing the longest and loudest passages you'll come across, ensuring a strong, unwavering tone.  That's the kind of work that's worth the time.

And the final word on obsessing about trying to control a muscle you don't actually have direct control over?  There are many, many important things to develop in the pursuit of becoming a great singer, but "singing from the diaphragm" is not one of them.

Have you ever read or been given singing advice and can't figure out whether it's true? Comment below and I'll sort it out for you.