Lesson #113C (02/03/13): EMajor, Vibrato & Judas Maccabeaus

EMajor:

• Clayton recommended that I start looking for "landmarks" in EMajor so I know where to shift and to also start vibrating each note to practice vibrato. 

Vibrato:

• What can I say? It's a new and awkward process and I've only been practicing this for two weeks so it kind of sucks. :)
• Clayton had the great idea of recording my vibrato so I can do a video analysis of it. I have to admit it's completely SPASTIC!! Lol! :). But at least, when I finally get it I can say this is how it used to look like, and my vibrato is more audible now. When I first started practicing my fingers were vibrating away, but I couldn't really hear it in the sound. 

Slowed 50%

• My video analysis:
• My hands look fairly tense and I need to relax them more
• I seem to stop and then restart my vibrato instead of making it smooth and continuous. I actually get it going and then second guess myself and then I stiffen up. I was also counting two sets of four for each finger and at the end of the first set I would pause, maybe I should count to eight?
• I think my hand is supposed to rotate more...
• Make sure my knuckles stay relaxed and loose
• Make sure I'm using my thumb and that it stays loose
• Like my teacher recommended, work on slower vibrato 
• During my lesson Clayton recommended:
• That I work on slow vibrato first and then speed it up later. Also, while working on slow vibrato I should make sure that I stay nice and relaxed, which really worked. Every time I attempted to vibrate slowly while reminding myself to stay relaxed, my vibrato was more consistent and more audible.
• Stay on top of the string - he reminded me that my fingers should be right atop the strings and pretend that my fingers are walking a tight rope and I need to stay balanced.
• Look at my hand - I tend to avoid looking at my hand and fingerboard because it's "sensory overload" for me and I tend to also tense up if I look at my fingers. In this case, he said it would be more helpful to look at my hands, although we ended up doing the recording because I kept tensing up when I looked at my hand. 

Judas Maccabeaus

• Without vibrato
• I'm bending my notes when I have to reach my fourth pinky. Clayton provided an exercise to work on making sure that I could reach out with my pinky without changing the position of my 2nd finger. Adam had mentioned that I had a problem with this as well. 
• My phrasing has improved, but that may be because I stopped counting in my head again. It's one or the other with me. If I count, I can't work on phrasing. To me phrasing works only because I feel like it should sound a certain way...I don't know, I can't explain it...I should probably think about it to figure out why that occurs, so I can make sure that I'm able to count and work on phrasing at the same time!
• With vibrato
• I need to focus on using slower vibrato and staying relaxed.
• I was trying to correct intonation while doing vibrato at the same time which was making it sound worse. Clayton recommended for now to work on vibrato and not to correct bad intonation while vibrating. 

I think I may record this one in the next two weeks and then record the two previous songs later since I have to re-learn those. I'll do a recording with and without vibrato - it's going to be "blah" and I expect the one with vibrato to be as bad as my Twinkle video! :)