Chinese Proverb

"Tell me and I'll forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I'll understand." - Chinese Proverb.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Lesson #84 (08/23/12): Shifting in G Major (2 octaves)

We started on the G Major scale and immediately I got a lot of corrections with my intonation and bowing. The first thought that ran through my mind was, "ugh, I haven't even warmed up yet and he's correcting me already! How can he possibly know what I've done to correct my mistakes from the last lesson?"

Followed by, "well... I really shouldn't need 20 minutes to warm-up to get it right in the first place; and if I really corrected it and understood what was happening then..." which ended my thought / complaint process!

We focused mainly on shifting during this lesson.

Shifting
  • Arm position - moving the whole arm and feeling like I'm "pushing something down." My hand likes to tilt forward so my hand tends to be sharp  
  • Thumb - the thumb should rest in the saddle. For some reason, this works for everyone except for me...yet. I think I haven't felt how it's supposed to feel like in the saddle so I keep missing it. 
  • Hand position - should be slightly slanted and should be the same hand position as my "first position hand"
Adam said what is most important in learning how to shift is: have a method!

He said there are a lot of methods out there and as long as it works for me, and I'm consistent, than I should continue using it. It's those that don't have a method to get from point A to point B that consistently miss the note.

Prior to this discussion he asked what my method was, which I replied that I think about lines on my fingerboard and skipping one line to get to E. Which at first he thought was kind of "interesting" but said that it works. I tried practicing and thinking about the saddle, hand position and arm position and was too sharp each time I practiced it, but thinking about where E is located and moving over "one line" gets me to the spot more consistently.

I think after a while of "thinking about skipping a line" and doing that for awhile, I'll start feeling it in my body and then I can start using the saddle as a physical marker.

May Time

Before I started the workshop, I was really getting Long Long Ago, but now I feel like I have to re-learn everything and I can feel myself getting bored and losing focus, so I requested that we move on to May Time.

We recorded May Time for me to start practicing for the next lesson. Yaay - new piece!! :D




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