Chinese Proverb

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

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Lesson #97C (10/28/12): Amaj, Fanfare & Minuet No 1&3

I didn't get a lot of time to practice the pieces that he assigned so I warned him that I wasn't going to be very good when I played the pieces. Fortunately, we had our lesson after our group ensemble so I was already warmed up, which made things a little easier.


A Major scale
Clayton wanted to move on to the next scale, but I requested that we practice this for another week since I didn't get a lot of practice time.
  • Shifting - we focused on making sure that my notes were "connected" 
  • Exercises - he reminded me to do my shifting exercises which I haven't been doing.. oops!
Shifting exercise from finger to finger.

1 => 1     1 => 3      2 => 1

1 => 2     1 => 4      2 => 2

  • Glissando - to practice these shifts he wants me to lightly touch the string and shift to the next note. We spent a lot of time on this trying to get the mechanics of it and for some reason it's very difficult for me to lighten the pressure as I gliss to the next note... I need to figure out why that is... 
    • However I discovered that if I focused on the top of my hand while I shift towards the scroll that I tended to get a cleaner more accurate shift, and that I feel like I'm doing a small "scoop" or something - I think it may be the thumb adjusting which creates the scooping feeling??..I don't know... 

Fanfare
I requested to work out of this book, and this was the first time we covered it. I didn't really get time to practice this so my rhythm was a bit off, but I was hitting the notes pretty consistently - though  my shifting technique was a bit off.

So far, I've really enjoyed working on these etudes! They're "easy" enough that I can focus on shifting and finding the position without having to worry about other technique.


Minuet No. 1
Clayton recommended that we apply the shifting concepts to this piece, but this went fairly well. I played through this a few times and had a few minor things to clean up; mostly I just need to polish this up a bit and make sure that I get ringing tones.


Minuet No. 3
Clayton decided that I could move on to the next piece so he recorded this piece to work on before our next lesson.

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