Developing breath control

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On the ocarina, your breath functions much like a guitarist's hand, outlining the notes you play. Being able to accurately control the breath is of exceptional importance.

To start with, let's just observe our normal breathing. Place one hand on your ribs and the other hand on your belly, then breathe so that your belly goes in and out. Close your eyes, observe how your body feels, and notice the air flowing.

You'll notice there are two stages: an inhalation stage, where the air moves into your lungs, and an exhalation stage, where the air is pushed out.

Exhaling rapidly, and using abdominal muscle support

When you observed your natural breathing, how long did the exhalation take? Perhaps about two or three seconds? By taking deliberate control over the breath, you can learn to extend and shorten this duration. Let's first learn how to exhale rapidly.

Say 'ha', similar to a laugh, 'ha, ha, ha ...'
Notice that there is a rhythmic muscle tightening in your chest.
Then, breathe in fully. Start exhaling with 'ha', but maintain the muscle engagement so that you exhale all of the air very quickly.

Repeat this a few times, exhaling through a wide-open mouth, and see how quickly you can push all of the air out of your body. With practice, it could take less than a second. If you take your ocarina, finger any note, and blow as hard as possible, you should notice that the instrument screeches.

As you did this, you likely noticed an engagement of your abdominal muscles, the muscles between the rib cage and pelvis. When you breathe using the diaphragm your belly goes in and out, and the abdominal muscles can be used to assist in pushing air out. Let's explore how to control these muscles:

Engage your abdominal muscles, this is like the action if you 'pull in' your belly. A common cue for this is 'draw the belly button towards the spine'.
Engage the muscles as hard as you can and call this feeling a ten.
Next, completely relax them, and call this feeling a zero.

When you're exhaling as rapidly as you can, you should aim to engauge your muscles at the '10' level. It may be helpful to spend a little time practising this. Relax the muscles when you breathe in and engage them to breathe out rapidly.

How to exhale slowly

Next, let's learn how to slow down the breath. Give this a try:

Breathe in as deeply as you can.
As you exhale, hum at a constant pitch.
Alternately, make a 'hissing' sound, with your tongue positioned just behind the gap between your upper and lower teeth.

How long did this exhalation take? Perhaps 15 seconds or longer? The rate of exhalation was slowed by the restriction in the air passage, but It is also possible to extend and exhalation without such restriction.

When you learned to exhale rapidly we discussed using the abdominal muscles to assist, and the same comes into play here. When exhaling slowly your muscle engagement should be in the region of one or two. Notice how the belly moved in slowly when you exhaled with a restriction, and replicate this feeling with a wide open mouth and airway:

Open your mouth wide and position the whole of your tongue at the base of your mouth.
Take a full inhalation.
Exhale through your mouth as slowly as possible.

Repeat this a few times using a stopwatch and see how long you can extend the exhalation. Can you exceed the time you needed to exhale while humming or hissing?

You may find it useful to put both of your hands on your belly with the tips of your middle fingers touching while exhaled. When you inhale, the fingers spread apart, and they will touch once you've fully exhaled.

Varying the duration of your breath

When you play the ocarina, you need to vary between these different rates with ease.

Start breathing out slowly, then gradually increase the rate of the exhalation towards it's end.
Try doing the same exercise again, but start exhaling rapidly and gradually reduce the pressure, ending at a slow rate of exhalation.
Finally, vary between the different rates randomly.

It is possible to take this a step further and practice exhaling to a count, gradually extending the duration:

Put on a metronome or count at a steady rate in your head.
Breathe in fully, then exhale quickly, aiming to expel all the air in a single metronome click.
Repeat, but exhale slowly, aiming to expel all the air over the period of two clicks.
Keep doing this, increasing the duration by one metronome click at each step.

See how slowly you can exhale. It's perfectly normal if you find at first that you overshoot or undershoot the intended duration.

This is similar to the Farinelli breathing exercise, but not identical to it. In that exercise, you also extend the duration of the inhalation and hold for the same count.

Applying this to the ocarina

Now let's try varying the blowing pressure while playing the ocarina (make sure you're in a space where you can make noises without fear of embarrassing yourself):

Take your ocarina and finger any note you like.
Smoothly ramp your blowing pressure from very low to as hard as you can.
Notice that when you blow harder, the ocarina's pitch rises, until finally, the instrument screeches due to being overblown.

If you finger a note from the instrument's fingering chart, and blow it, varying the blowing pressure, its pitch will change depending on how hard you blow. Play the note for a whole breath, and vary your breath pressure until each note sounds in tune, using a chromatic tuner as a guide.

If you do this for the other notes on the instrument, you'll find that each note requires a different amount of pressure to sound in tune. When you move from one note to another, it is important to be able to make this change as a 'stair step', rapidly changing from one pressure to the next such that the second note starts exactly in tune.

A good place to practice this is to practice playing the adjacent notes of a scale:

Assuming a C ocarina, blow a long tone on the low C, using a chromatic tuner or reference pitch to learn the needed pressure.
Blow a long tone on the low D, noticing the pressure difference between C and D.
Play both C and D in a single breath, making the pressure change needed so that the D begins in tune.

By continuing this approach for the rest of the adjacent notes in the scale you can learn to play the whole scale in tune. If you were to graph them, the pressure changes between notes would look like a staircase.

Breathing on the ocarina is pretty easy when we are only playing ascending or descending scales, as the pressure only needs to change a little. But as you play larger leaps or at a higher tempo, we have much less time to change our blowing pressure between notes.

Making large changes rapidly is a matter of using the abdominal muscles as discussed earlier in the article, engaging or relaxing them as needed. Try the following exercises:

Without your ocarina, rapidly alternate between your lowest and highest pressure, and vice versa.
Play ascending and descending leaps between octaves of the same note (like low C to high C), aiming to eliminate pitch errors caused by the pressure changing too slowly.
Practice rapid exhalation and inhalation, exhaling only a little of your capacity, then inhaling a little again. Keep these breaths shallow and even, similar to a dog panting.
Try 'stepping' an inhalation and exhalation: breathe, stop, breathe, stop, etc.

There are additional tips on synchronising your breath and fingers in Articulating notes on the ocarina.

Breath control is a skill that will evolve naturally over time. Should you ever find yourself struggling with it, I recommend searching for advice from teachers (video tutorials or in person) of a similar instrument, such as the flute. As of writing, these instruments have a much more established serious player tradition than the ocarina, and there is a lot of advice available.