Lesson #58 (03/30/12): Minuet in C & Bowing

For the past week or so, I've been trying to increase my volume, and I seemed to have achieved it, but I noticed that my tone and quality of sound completely went down the toilet! :(.

I was complaining to my co-worker about this, and he commented that he'd rather have good tone than volume any day of the week! Which got me thinking, and I came to a realization - that maybe my teacher was not looking for volume per se, but the rich tonal quality that blossoms into a sound that expands and therefore has more volume. Or, maybe this is what Adam tried to explain to me and it's finally sunk in!

And maybe, trying to create volume, is the first step to expanding tonal quality? I tried playing really loud which sounded atrocious (very harsh and grating to my ears), than I tried getting the same volume but with better tone and kept going back and forth to try and find a balance between the two. I noticed that every time I tried to get better tonal quality, my sound seemed to dissipate and I couldn't quite get it to have the same volume. It was an interesting experiment, one that didn't quite work, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.


Lesson Notes:

Minuet in C

• Going into the lesson, I knew this piece was going to sound harsh, albeit more volume, which was the case! So we worked on bow location and stacatto. 

Bow Location

• More weight less bow 
• Try in different spots 
• String crossings
• From D String to A String
• Transfer weight across the strings 
• On A string, a small impulse on as to get it to move and more weight
• For now the rotation is fine, but later we should work on getting it to be less obvious
• Exercise #1
• Sequentially go down the string to get different sounds 

Stacatto 

• Motion in the 1st finger 
• Then arm 
• It feels like tricep stops the bow to hit a break, almost feels like leading with the elno 
• Start impulse with first finger 

Work on getting constant contact with bow and string to create more of an articulation sound.