Yoga for Musicians English Piano Teacher Free Audio Classes Adults Children.

hi tail tellers welcome to our first proper yoga for musicians session this is just an introductory session today really i want to tell you how important and beneficial yoga can be to musicians specifically look yoga is beneficial to everybody but it's particularly beneficial to musicians for a couple of reasons the most sort of obvious i guess is the physical um impact that yoga can have on our bodies and the ability to alleviate stress which can be physically manifested you know panic i'm talking about panic here but also posture posture is incredibly important to musicians and if you've spent your life over a piano or hunched while you're performing your with your cello i'm a cellist and pianist so i particularly understand about those instruments but most musicians are guilty of hours and hours of practice in incorrect positions and it's just who we are and then what happens is we we're not only in a bad position where our core is challenged and then our muscles are challenged and finally our bones are challenged to the point of arthritic conditions we're also seizing up but the other thing is musicians we are so in love with our instruments and so in love with making music that we don't have a cutoff point and most musicians will just plow through the pain so it gets to a certain stage when you know we've all done this we've all been absolutely really thirsty but we've just um you know we just embarked on a six-hour practice and i've done it i've done it i've been so thirsty and i thought i'm just going to play this through one more time and i haven't even gone and got a drink of water so part of these yoga sessions will be really about trying to remind you that you you need to before you get thirsty for example and before you feel pain and before you have any of the signs of stress that you already prevent them occurring because prevention is better than cure okay it's really important that you don't wait until your body is trying to tell you and actually when it's too late so how we start with musicians yoga at telltale club is we learn how to breathe okay and breathing is such an integral part of yoga now i've got a really exciting connection for cellists um i don't i'm not sure if it works with violinists because i don't hold a violinist bow but it may do but it def it's so cool this connection if you take your on your right hand it's your bowing hand if you take your middle finger and your fourth finger and you curl them round and you take your thumb and you curl that round and if you bring them together that's pretty much how you would hold your bow now let's do some yoga breathing and see what happens what i want you to do is i want you to put your full fourth finger and your middle finger on your left hand nostril and i want you to draw breath in on a count of four and then let it out slowly on a count of eight

through your mouth

now the interesting thing about this is you're going to use your thumb in alternate breathing so you're going to do four breaths on the left in and out through your mouth and then four with your thumb now what's so fantastic is that this positioning over your nose is almost identical to how you would hold your bow and you wouldn't push hard into your nose or your nostril would you and the third and fourth finger you don't use the tips they're rather flattened against your nostril this is exactly how we wrap our hand around the frog of the cellist's bow how cool is that it's absolutely brilliant this connection anyway back to the yoga so four breaths in through the nostril and out through the mouth really slowly and then the alternate nostril now what you'll find is by doing this you begin to calm down so i recommend i mean you can do more than four each side if you want to do this you can actually do this for a very long time you could do it for 10 minutes and you could almost find yourself in a meditative state and what i suggest is when you're getting really uptight about a piece of music you're just not getting it um you're getting stressed out or perhaps you're getting stressed out about a performance you've got to do perhaps you're a recording artist like myself perhaps you've got a composition and and it needs to be done i've got a couple of deadlines for the end of the month for example and i'm already getting starting to feel a bit stressed about them because they're not quite ready and you know all these things impact on the production even if you're a composer although you're not performing live necessarily the impact of how you're going to construct the music is it it will show it will show if you're rushed or stressed you'll make mistakes or perhaps if you're not concentrating correctly you'll put a chord together um you know that that isn't quite working it's you know for some reason but it's probably because you've brought some stress with you okay so this breathing really just helps bring you down to earth and enables you to relax so what i suggest when you're practicing is actually i'd like to say every 20 minutes look out the window have a sip of water and take some of these breaths most musicians cannot do that quite often i can't get uh you know avid musicians musicians who are quite advanced and perhaps working on technical passages i can't get them to stop after an hour so you understand how really um it's worth if you can having a little you know a little bleeper somewhere that just bleeps every 20 minutes or let's say half an hour after 40 minutes your body is going to start to complain and i really do recommend that you don't go longer than 40 minutes without getting up from your instrument or putting your instrument down having a stretch that would be a neck stretch an arm stretch and we'll do classes for all these exercises a little bit of physio um flopping down to the ground and even do you know what i have next to my piano i actually have a yoga mat and it's just there all the time and i make myself stop get up do a few stretches just a few and just take myself into that slightly meditative state now with meditation it's it's very hard for musicians to shut their brains off shut them down completely and sometimes it really helps to do the breathing to enable you to think about nothing else okay this wonderful plane that we travel to when there is nothing on our minds is um it's a golden opportunity to reboot and rethink and what you'll find is afterwards wonderful ideas come to you because you've emptied your mind of worry and stress now i think that's enough for now but remember to do this breathing and if you're a cellist do it in with those fingers that i suggested and feel the gentleness of your touch and that is how you should be holding your cello bow wrapped around the frog okay so i hope you enjoyed that little session i'm recording here on an ipad i think it's much much nicer sounding than um the mac i've been recording a lot of our classes on the mac and i think it's rubbish actually the microphone's rubbish a tip for musicians and i always tell my students please record yourself often as often as possible on your phone and play it back and hear your errors and your mistakes it really is most helpful anyway i'm digressing if you want to become part of the wonderful tale teleclub um there's no joining procedure all you have to do is download an app i play uh itunes spotify um amazon prime amazon prime amazon something amazon music you can get us on alexa and all these different places um all these different apps you can pop on your phone and you can access all of the classes for free telltale kids is aimed for children and young young people but i do have an awful lot of adult material on there and when i say adult material i don't mean you know dodgy adult material i mean material that adults will benefit from as well um i've put up some true crime earlier actually so we've got lots and lots of wonderful wonderful free audio books but from the public domain by our colleagues at librivox as just a stunning array but there is a lot of material that is particularly guided for children and young people and a lot of my students are very young and um you know up to about 13. however i anticipate that lots and lots of grown-ups will share the joy of learning to play a musical instrument so i will be back um later we've got an evening of piano lessons suzuki piano lessons so i'll see you over there if you're a pianist or if you just want to listen to some tinkling