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You are here: Home / Lessons / Hide Those Shifts! – Quick Practice Tip

Hide Those Shifts! – Quick Practice Tip

Teacher: David Wallace

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!

About David Wallace

Dr. David Wallace improvises solos like “Jimmy Page fronting Led Zeppelin” (New York Times). A composer, Texas-style fiddler, and musician fluent in classical, rock, jazz, CCM, and more, Doc Wallace chairs Berklee College of Music’s String Department. Previously, he enjoyed fourteen years as Juilliard professor, and seventeen years as New York Philharmonic Teaching Artist.

David is an internationally-touring musician; an award-winning composer; and a master teaching artist who has performed, consulted, and authored curricula for dozens of performing arts institutions, including Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Tanglewood Music Festival.

David has also gained widespread acclaim for his ability to connect with audiences in diverse settings. His Berklee Press book, Engaging the Concert Audience: A Musician’s Guide to Interactive Performance, is widely considered “an invaluable manual for all musicians, classical or otherwise” (Symphony Magazine).  Never content to let music remain in the concert hall, David actively brings his artistry to venues like schools, hospitals, psychiatric facilities, homeless shelters, houses of worship, and prisons.

David performs and records with his Texas-style string band, The Doc Wallace Trio; classical flute-viola-harp trio Hat Trick; klezmer / world-fusion jam band, Yale Strom’s Broken Consort; and symphonic metal tour de force, The Chuck & David Show.  Watch videos of David’s electrifying performances on YouTube, and learn more at www.docwallacemusic.com.

Join Talent Forge and learn from David.

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