(04-26-2016, 07:55 AM)green wings Wrote: Wow, good for you! I have one, but I rarely play it. I haven't learned to do the circular breathing.
How did you learn to do circular breathing? Do you play other wind instruments as well?
Have you seen the NIH study on didge playing and sleep apnea? Oboe and English horn are supposed to be helpful, too, but only if you play them for three hours per day.
I do play other wind instruments, though nothing likely to help with apnea (assuming that any wind instrument would help). For example, I play ocarina (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYvlHsv5xx0) and occasionally tenor sax. But I'm not in any kind of ensemble, and sax isn't much fun to play by myself, so I don't pick it up much. I'm strictly an amateur.
The circular breathing feels all wrong at first, but it didn't take more than a couple of days before I was getting something. It took a few weeks to get it to sound more or less right.
The thing about circular breathing is that it requires you to inflate your mouth and throat with air and, while inhaling, to use your lips to continue to make the didge sound. To do this, you have to create air pressure using your cheeks and, to some extent, throat. You can feel the tension as you do it.
You can do circular breathing on the sax, although I haven't practiced it. I think Kenny G once held the record for a continuous note played on a sax, using circular breathing. I'd imagine you could do it on brass instruments as well. I've seen it done on a bagpipe chanter, which is essentially a kind of oboe.
The thing is, even though you may be able to do circular breathing on French horn and oboe, I think most players don't, because there's not much musical use for it. It's very hard to maintain a clear steady pitch while circular breathing, but classical music kinda demands that clarity and steadiness.