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Two fundamental realizations happened to me during my today's practice. The first one is about vibrato. After discovering that my thumb was interfering with the vibrato, I tried to relax it entirely, but this was not the optimal solution! Relaxing your thumb fully means you do not support the violin's weight with your thumb, and you have to hold it with your neck all the time! So, what is the solution? And then, a thought occurred to me, what if I help my vibrato with my thumb by slightly counter-pressing the thumb in the opposite direction to the hand? A good way to think about it is that when you step forward, you only can do it because you press your back leg backward. I tried to do that, first slowly, then faster and faster, and suddenly my vibrato became much better!

The second realization was about the use of the flat bow. I come up with it after listening to Adam Han-Gorski on the tonebase. He is another big advocate of putting bow hair flat on the string, but he was saying something extra - with a low bow tension and when closer to the bridge. And indeed, now this makes perfect sense. I also like low-bow tension, and for me, it sounds better. But when you are close to the bridge, you need more pressure, and you can not do this with the tilted bow with low hair tension! On the other hand, when you go away from the bridge tilted bow (and lower pressure) makes perfect sense!

For today's practice, I decided to start with major scales and arpeggios (in two octaves), which begin on the first finger (A flat, A, B flat B, and so on). My plan was to play it all the way through to the third position, but immediately I began to experience problems with my intonation in A flat. The interesting thing with A flat is you could not trust the Intonia application with the intonation in A flat:)). It is tuned in a formal Pythagorean tuning system which practical violinists will not use when they play in the A flat (in this system, the open G and open D are suddenly shown to be lower than they are. So I use Intonia with B flat instead (but not E flat, which still screws open E and shows it higher). And it took me some time to get the intonation right (with is always tricky when you have very few ringing notes in the scale). Anyway, I spend most of my time getting A flat(both scale and arpeggio) right. And did not even get to the second position (my main goal). But there is always tomorrow:).

Being pressed for time, I began to practice Seitz concerto, but this time for efficient time management, I decided to determine the part where I had the most difficulties and focus on it. And, of course, it was a part that I wanted to play in the second position! The second part was the end of the first movement (which was also not a big surprise since I still needed to practice it). But I could play it with vibrato (in the slow tempo), which was considerable progress since the last time:).