Basic Technique - 1

The first thing when singing in the choir that must be understood is the BREATHING TECHNIQUE
The correct breathing for singing is the diaphragmatic breathing. Many people have not mastered this breathing technique, because by default almost everyone in their everyday lives use chest breathing, inhale the air and store only in the upper part of their lungs. This is understandable because people speak in their everyday life use breathing like this.
Chest breathing is not adequate to sustain / support when singing. Therefore breathing is often referred as the support when singing. With chest breathing we only use about 3/4 lung capacity to store the air. It is not enough especially when we would sing some songs that are quite long, we will soon run out of air and consequently our voice becomes unstable, jittery.
It is therefore important to quickly master the diaphragmatic breathing. To exercise it we can try to get used with the belly breathing first. Here are the steps:

1. Body relax.
2. Inhale the air with our mouth and nose simultaneously.
3. Inflate our belly up to maximum

The easiest way to detect errors in breathing is to pay attention to our shoulder. If we breathe with the abdomen, our shoulder should not move. In contrast with chest breathing, our shoulder will move.

Feel the air fill the belly in front of us. Repeat these steps until you feel the entire belly cavity,the sides and the back tightened because it filled with the air.
If we are able to feel up to the back of our body expanded, then we've succeeded in doing diaphragmatic breathing.
The logic is that our lungs is a 3-dimensional object, it can inflate into the front-back, top-down, left and right. Makes sense if we fill the entire our lungs space, our body cavity will expand to those directions also, not just bulging our belly. It's called as diaphragmatic breathing since our diaphragm (a membrane below the lungs) will move down, in contrast with chest breathing that does not move the diaphragm.

Continue to practice these techniques until we get used to do it when singing