Day 17
Hurray, no pain at all in the elbow today. I still need to be careful not to overexert it and use my other muscles at the bow change.
Yesterday I was reading about bow grips and got an interesting idea. The “Russian” bow grip (which was not taught in Russia at all:) ) was better suited for fast light bowing at the tip, using the martele stroke. When I was checking it out, I noticed that keeping this way at the tip (with the bow almost touching the palm) is more natural. The angle between your arm and hand changes through the bow, and if you want to keep your hand position as natural as possible, you need to let the bow slip on your first finger. And it naturally changes from the “Russian” hold at the tip to Franco-Belgian at the frog! It is not that difficult to do, and it puts much less stress on the muscles and joints of your hand. The drawbacks are:
It is more difficult to control the bow.
You can get a blister on your finger:).
But I want to investigate this idea further because I like the benefits more than the drawbacks.
After playing on open strings, I wanted to get a better tone on other notes, and I noticed two problems.
Immediately after I hit the fingerboard, the tension in my left shoulder/arm (and by symmetry in the right) increased.
The tone becomes less even.
I think the second problem resulted from the first (and I also noticed that maintaining the sound point was more difficult). But what helped with the relaxation was one of Kalinovsky's ideas to “shake” your body a little bit and ensure that nothing is completely “frozen.”
After that, I added the vibrato and immediately noticed more tension. Every time you increase the complexity, your body reacts with tension. So, I slow down my vibrato (slightly below four beats per second) and begin isolating the muscles I need to maintain the vibrato and relaxing all muscles I do not need. At that speed, I could keep vibrato through the whole bow (but I still need to learn how to make a smooth bow change with uninterrupted vibrato).
Yesterday’s practice taught me that I should not mix two skills if I want to improve them. Practicing the third position and vibrato did not save me any time. It was the opposite :). So, today I decided to practice vibrato with exercises from Hanley’s first book (which is in the first position). I begin with no.1 on page 23. Immediately I notice some other challenges I have to address first.
Correct bow distribution.
Counting rest correctly:).
Clean string crossings.
After solving these problems, I tried to add a continuous vibrato. Far from perfect (and it never is:)) ), but better, and this is what counts.
Here is the video fragment of this practice: https://youtu.be/3ZWXmlMDnRQ