Day 8

I am curious why the writing practice diary is not yet a standard teaching method. Aaron Rosan said once that one thing which often distinguishes students who learn faster is the ability to continuously analyze their performance and troubleshoot problems without the teacher's help. But writing a violin diary makes you precisely that, to identify, research, and resolve your issues! I have learned more about playing violin in the last seven days than in the previous two months.

Plan for today:

With open strings, check if yesterday's practice is retained.
Another vibrato practice. But the main objective is different - do vibrato, but do not lose tone. Only after that widen the vibrato (keeping tone intact).
Finish what I did do yesterday (G major scale in three octaves).
Do G major scale with an accent on first now and vibrato.

At the beginning of practice with open strings, I notice that the A string is slightly dull. It turns out it was out of tune. It is interesting how strings become brighter with a ringing tone when perfectly in tune. It may be due to overtones, but it may also be my violin. I am not sure. Also, I was experimenting a little bit with a "flat" bow versus a "tilted" bow (same pressure, same speed, same sound point (but with the flat bow, it is a little bit more challenging to determine the sound point). Again, the flat bow makes a sound slightly more sandy, and with tilted, it is purer. Or maybe all this is because I belong to the "tilted bow club" :)).

Another important observation is that the main reason to keep the pressure low when bowing near the fingerboard is not to dampen the string. The string amplitude is already visible around the fingerboard, and too much weight will stop the string from vibrating freely. To make the string vibrate, you can use mainly speed. And near the bridge, you need to put more weight to initiate string vibration, but after that, you need much less weight to maintain it.

` While doing the change of sound point exercise (with a slow down bow and fast up bow), I was pondering about the "mysterious" figure eight many violinists (like Perelman) were talking about. It happens almost naturally when you change the sound point, but when I rewatched Perelman's video (The Bow | Itzhak Perlman Teaches Violin | MasterClass), he is not changing his sound point. That made to think about it and run more experiments. What I come up with probably differs from what Perelman had in mind, but nevertheless:)). The explanation I come up with is the "wrist flick." If at the frog, your wrist "flicks" downward, your bow naturally rotates clockwise, and similarly, if you slightly flick your wrist upward at the tip during the bow change, it rotates counterclockwise. That makes your bow tip draw a very narrow figure 8. It happens for Perelman, Isaac Stern (and many other famous violinists) because their bow is usually not perpendicular to the strings at the tip. I think this is a more natural way to use a full bow at the tip because it requires less effort than extending your arm fully. Additionally, the fully extended arm with a bow perpendicular to the string causes too much strain on my wrist). If it worked for Perelman and Stern, it could work for me, too:)).

Now the vibrato practice. In my video for day seven, my wrist motion was too large. Can I make it smaller? I also want to keep my vibrato wide, and I need to put my finger on the pad rather than on a tip. It helps my first knuckle to be looser and makes a wider vibrato with less effort from the wrist. Before vibrating, I first establish my sound (ensuring that my tone is good) and vibrate very slowly. I am using audio-visual feedback (I always do it with vibrato practice), listening to the sound, and looking at the Intonia graph. Both the sound and the graph must be smooth and uniform.

I begin to vibrate slowly and gradually speed up. Immediately I noticed my body started to tense, especially my left shoulder. As a remedy, I vibrate in small "bursts of vibrato," followed by a pause without a vibrato. After my body became more relaxed, I began to add more beats. My bow wants to slow down when I vibrate, and I try to speed it up instead. It is hard! My vibrato immediately becomes less even. I go down to one vibrato beat. My focus now is to keep bow speed constant. I go to two beats, then to three beats. It is becoming better! I think this is the power of the "audio-visual" approach. The Intonia graph gives you objective feedback. The good sound with excellent vibrato looks like calligraphy. And a bad one as a three old drawing:). I repeat these steps with other fingers, but now I am getting tired, and the quality begins to drop, so I have to stop. But I made good progress today. Here is a summary of what I learned in my first session:

After the string begins to vibrate, you can maintain it with less weight (but still sufficient speed) even when you are close to the bridge.
I should not try to keep my bow perpendicular at the tip. It puts too much strain on my wrist. A slightly angled bow makes bowing easier, and I did not notice any problems with the sound.
When practicing vibrato, I need to do it in small bursts to keep my bow speed constant and to allow my body to relax. Then I can gradually increase the number of beats per burst.

For my evening practice, I was not in the best shape (sleepy for some reason). I started with G major scale in three octaves for a warm-up, and I was jump-shifting and repeating the last part in the fifth position to get everything right (my notes from day 6 were very useful in recalling all essential points). Next, I tried to play the entire scale with the Galiamin shift. And I was confused with triplets! I never practiced triplets on the whole bow and got to spend a couple of minutes on the correct bow distribution.

Finally, back to the Seitz concerto. Today I chose to practice measures 35 to 51 (which I played but did not practice yet). And it was easy! My morning practice with a long down bow and a quick up bow kicked in and made the bowing with these patterns a breath. No vibrato (too unsteady), but bowing becomes much easier, and the sound is better! Despite my sleepiness:).