About Hide Those Shifts! – Quick Practice Tip:
Hi there, I’m Dr. David Wallace with myTalentForge.com’s Quick Tip of the Week!
And this week’s Quick Tip is hide your shifts!
I don’t know how many times I hear string players play and they’re doing a scale or something and I hear this big […] shift that I don’t want to hear.
Now, this is not like when you’re playing expressively and we want to have a vocal slide.
This is just when we’re doing technical passages. We don’t want those shifts to be audible. So what do we do?
Well, first, with your finger, you come to the surface of the string before your shift. Then you shift, and then when you’re to the new position and the new note, then you come back down.
And so you release, shift, come back down.
So your left hand lets go, and that will help take away some of the sound.
The other thing is your bow should slow down and you lighten the pressure a little bit. So actually, it’s this kind of a thing […].
Now that probably didn’t make much of a fluctuation in sound but you saw it’s almost like I drew a little bit of a wavy line or a smile with my bow, where I dip down and came up. I also slowed down a little bit.
So, if I do these two things, I get a clean shift without the big, gross smear.
For further tips on shifting, check out myTalentForge.com’s Secrets For Shifting Success Series. And that is your Quick Tip of the Week.
Hide those shifts!
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