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, and breathe so that your belly goes in and out. Close your eyes, observe how your body feels, and notice the air flowing in your thought.

You'll notice that there is an inhalation stage, where the air moves into your lungs, and an exhalation stage, where it is pushed out.

How to exhale slowly

In the previous step, how long does each inhalation and exhalation take? Perhaps about two or three seconds?

When we breathe in normal life, we don't pay much attention to the rate of our breathing, the air just flows as it does. But when we play a wind instrument, we need to take direct control of our breathing.

The first step is learning to slow down or elongate 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.

Now, how long does this take? Perhaps 15 seconds or longer?

In this exercise, the exhalation is slowed by creating a restriction in the air passage, but if you pay attention to your chest, you'll also get a sense for how it feels to exhale slowly. We can learn to exhale slowly without restriction by making use of this feeling:

Open your mouth wide, and position your whole 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 of exhaling while you were humming or hissing?

You may find that it helps to engage your abdominal muscles slightly during the exhalation, a cue being '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.
While playing, you want something in the region of one or two.
Take care not to create unneeded muscle tension in other parts of the body.

It may be helpful to spend a little time practising this. Relax the muscles when you breathe in, and lightly engage them as you breathe out.

Also, try putting your two hands on your belly with the tips of your middle fingers touching. When you inhale, the fingers spread apart, and they will touch once you've fully exhaled.

Exhaling very fast

As we learned in the previous step, we can exhale remarkably slowly if we try to do so, and we can also exhale rapidly. Let's learn how:

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.

And if you take your ocarina, finger any note, and blow as hard as possible, you should notice that the instrument screeches.

Blowing fast and slow

When we play the ocarina, we need to be able to vary between these different rates with ease. To get a basic feel for how it feels to breathe at different rates:

Put on a metronome, or count at a steady rate in your head.
Breathe in fully, and exhale, aiming to expel all the air in a single metronome click.
Then repeat, aiming to expel all the air over the period of two clicks.
And keep doing this, increasing the duration by one metronome click at each step.

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

See how slow you can make the exhalation. You may find at first that you overshoot or undershoot the intended duration, which is perfectly normal.

When we play the ocarina, we need to vary the blowing pressure over the duration of a single breath. Give this a try:

Start with a series of full breaths, making some of them slow, others rapid, and others somewhere in-between.
Start breathing out slowly, and then gradually increase your breath pressure in steps, until you are exhaling pretty fast.
Try doing the same thing again, but this time start exhaling rapidly, and gradually reduce the pressure in steps, ending at a slow rate of exhalation.
And finally, vary between the different rates randomly.

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, and:

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 raises until finally, the instrument screeches due to being overblown.

As you do this, you'll hear that as you blow harder, the pitch gets sharper until the ocarina screeches. Each note requires a different amount of pressure to sound at the correct pitch, and we can learn these pressures by working towards playing a scale from the lowest to the highest note:

Blow a long tone on the low C.
Blow a long tone on the low D, noticing the pressure difference between C and D.
Play C and D over the duration of a single breath, and consciously and rapidly make the needed pressure change as you move from note to note.

When we change pressure, we want it to be as close to a stair-step pattern as possible. We do not want to be slowly changing pressure over a long time (unless done deliberately for ornamental reasons). There are additional tips on synchronising your breath and fingers in Articulating notes on the ocarina.

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

Without your ocarina:

See how fast you can switch between your lowest and highest pressure and vice versa.
Play a leap between octaves of the same note (like low C to high C), aiming to eliminate pitch errors caused by pressure changing too slowly.
Practice rapid exhalation and inhalation, exhaling only a little of your capacity, then inhaling a little again. Keep these shallow and even, similar to a dog panting. This helps you learn to make rapid changes in blowing pressure, which we need for intonation control over the range.
Try 'stepping' an inhalation and exhalation: breathe, stop, breathe, stop etc.

Also, notice if you are 'boosting' the start of notes with too much pressure, or undershooting, and then compensating to the correct pressure. Doing so, the note will begin sharp or flat. There are ornamental reasons you may want to do this, but it is also important to learn to start your notes exactly in tune.

Breath control is a skill that will evolve naturally over time, but 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 flute. These instruments have a much more established serious player tradition than the ocarina as of writing.