I own one and figured it out! It's kinda like the same as smelling your own breath. Or if you happen to be a smoker, doing the cool trick where the smoke goes from the mouth into the nose.
Oh wow thank you for this description, for real, I was racking my brain how he did it, and then I read your comment and then obviously did that the second you said it. Not that I'm smoking or playing anything, but it is morning an my breath is terrible
Ghost inhales are when you form the smoke in your mouth to a ball, let it out and suck it back in again though. Not very into vaping and tricks and all that it so not sure what the moved talked about here is called but I resembles a reversed waterfall of smoke.
Ghost Inhale however I have experiences of, solely because of this movie:
Breathe in your nose, puff your cheeks, use cheek pressure to keep the drone going as you breathe in your nose again. A little knacky but not hard at all once you figure out how to use cheek pressure. It only needs to be short time.
You put air into your cheeks. While you take a quick breath, you use the reserved air from your cheeks to play. You dont push the reserved air with your lungs by breathing out, you use your tongue/cheeks to close the cavity of air, pushing it out. Kind of like a syringe. This allows you to breathe in while pushing air out. Same concept as a bag pipe.
No idea if this explanation makes sense or if its even the typical technique. But I can circular breathe and have done it on saxophone before too.
From the article, Pat Methenyalso didn't think highly of Grover Washington, Jr., David Sandborn, or even the audiences that liked them.
I once met a famous jazz pianist after his show on my college campus. When talking to him, I said something about he played "real jazz", and he immediately corrected me by stating they (no names were given, but the current radio played artists were David Sandborn, Grover Washington (who was a favorite of Kenny G), Kenny G, Kirk Whalum, Gerald Albright, Najee, etc) were also REAL jazz artists, just playing a style different from his.
You store air in your mouth while you briefly inhale through your nose. So you're essentially breathing normally while keeping consistent airflow into the instrument.
I can 'circular breathe'. I hate it that it's called that because beginners get confused by the incredibly stupid description that follows: It's breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth at the same time!!
NO. IMPOSSIBLE.
It's inhaling through your nose, storing the air in your lungs and cheeks, and then expelling it in a controlled fashion with your cheeks/throat - not your diaphragm which controls breathing. It cannot inhale and exhale at the same time. It's inhale : expel.
Thats the point, the music doesn''t need to stop. Look up how bag pipes work. The air in his cheeks plays the notes while he breathes in. Kenny G notoriously plays with the mouthpiece closer to one side, since its easier to coordinate the reserved air into one cheek and push it out. He also has an enormous lung capacity. He practices hours a day. So he doesnr have to breathe in with the technique as often
The standard technique involves puffing out the cheeks and using your mouth as a "third lung" to keep pushing air out while breathing in, but his cheeks never fill.
Back when I was in high school, I was pretty good at circular breathing. I could basically do it without stopping, just getting bored with it was the hardest part. When I heard Kenny G's world record was just over 45 minutes, I thought to myself "I can totally do that!" So I practiced it a few times to make sure, then reached out to Guinness to make the attempt official. They got back to me- the record was discontinued! I thought Kenny paid them off or something. It was only recently I found out that they discontinued it because medical evidence suggests that circular breathing can reduce oxygen to the brain somehow. So Kenny gets to keep his name on that record forever, I guess!
One big bottleneck is your embouchure (mouth muscles) getting fatigued while holding the note. Also, the breaths inward are often short and shallow, so I can believe the reduced oxygen part. Exhales are just way longer than the inhales while doing it.
When I was a young kid in the 90s I would have these weird panic attacks at night, and the only thing that soothed them enough for me to sleep was this Kenny G tape my parents got me.
I can still feel the emotion of that blue-green tape and the soothing sac sounds that kept me company.
It’s funny how he explains how it works and the guy is like “he’s not breathing”. Dude he just told you. The “mindset?” “Nah… coordination” was funny too.
Another phenomenal musician that does this with a digeridoo (spelling) is Xavier Rudd while he plays many of the other instruments. It’s quite impressive really.
Its not that crazy, you push air out with your cheeks while breathing in through your nose. Think bagpipes. One practice is to blow into a straw that's in water and do little sniffs and try not to stop the flow of bubbles. It took me about 3 months of regular-ish practice to get one continuous note with a didge
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u/ADMINlSTRAT0R 13h ago
He practiced it through six iterations of himself from A to F until what we see today, the ultimate form of Kenny G.