DAILY UPDATES (Week One, Main Thread) - Submissions, Questions & Discussion

Mehmet Mehmet, this is great! Thank you for sharing all this! I don't think this is going into too much detail at all!

Just out of curiosity, did you set the metronome to increase the speed automatically or did you just do it manually every four bars?

More importantly, that awareness you had at the end, along the lines of "okay, that was too fast", is such an important benefit of doing this kind of technical work!

Not only do we get to test and know our limits, we also get a feel for the "difficulty curve" leading up to it - we know where it was still full comfortable and what is the first thing that was lost.

I personally like to do different types of metronome levels for different exercises:

• Sometimes (especially on medium-difficulty exercises), I like to start extremely slow - think, eighth notes at 60 bpm - and only go up to what feels like 80% of my limit
• Other times, I like to start at a medium tempo and force myself to go way beyond my comfort zone, to perhaps 120-125% of where I feel I can still sound clean and "savor" the notes, as you say
• At the beginnings and ends of practice sessions, I often do a "long exercise" where I start at a medium-slow speed and go all the way to ~105% of what feels comfortable.

All of these are important and achieve different purposes! One needs to be very careful to balance them, and not to fall in one extreme or the other, but I do think they are all quite valuable.

What do you think?

Mehmet wonderful idea! I might briefly go over some of these aspects in my "Week 2" livestream next Friday! I have had a love-hate relationship with automatic tempo increases over the years - I used to hate them, then I liked them, now I am somewhere in the middle. Really glad to hear they've been working out for you though! I have also used them successfully at some points in the past.

Mehmet This is a really cool and interesting idea! I'm certainly suffered from the inability to set different tempos for different passages in the past (perhaps I should give your metronome app a try!), and have fixed such passages by splitting them up into smaller sections and practicing those individually.

I'd be careful with becoming overly reliant on "baked-in" tempo changes in short sections, because we do tend to "solidify" our tempi that we most often practice in, and we usually don't want to be stuck with a lot of different tempi in such a short time.

However, in this case, I think this works, because the beginning of the Capricho Arabe contains this "recitativo"-style opening which should, in fact, feel different than the rest, time-wise. So basically, I think you're doing it well! Haha 

Mehmet That's so great to hear! The Dreamstage event is not embedded anywhere on the tonebase platform itself because the site doesn't really have a place for it - while individual users might be interested in it, we wouldn't want to shoehorn it into an inappropriate place, such as under lessons or upcoming releases. We are sending out some emails to our user base and launching a few social media campaigns related to it though. If our team members do find an appropriate place for it on the platform though, we will go ahead and add it! In any case, I'm very much looking forward to seeing you there on Sunday!

Michael Great job, Michael! Thanks a lot for sharing with us!  I was very happy to see your video!

You're right, the middle finger has a bit of a different sound in the recording, and it may well be related to the nail shape.

More importantly for these exercises however, what I'm noticing is that the middle finger has a very easy time going away from the strings at the same time as the index finger plays the next note - the index finger does not however do that at the same rate.

Rather, while the middle finger is playing, the index finger is sort of staying behind in the same position, instead of getting ready for its turn by moving away from the strings.

This is something I've had to fight in my own practice for very long, which is why I know working on it can bring great benefit.

Try it out and let me know what happens!

Here's an exercise for you:

Hold an object, such as a pencil (or your own left-hand index finger) parallel to the string, about half an inch away from it while you play the rest-stroke exercise.

At the same time as playing a note with the index finger, try to get the middle finger to hit the pencil.

Do the same with the index finger while the middle finger is playing and you'll see that one of them has an easier time than the other in actually reaching the pencil.

Try to slap the pencil though! Not just touch it, but "hit" it with momentum. Of course, that is an exaggeration of the movement, but it might train your fingers well for this sort of alternation. Let me know if you get a chance to try!

Michael Awesome!  hope it helps - it certainly helped me, when I started working on that

Mehmet Oh no, your nails! I hate when that stuff happens - just two months ago I managed to break my p nail really badly by literally walking into a door frame while I was distracted by my phone  so annoying!

Changing from tasto to ponticello is a really cool thing to practice though! Did you find that worked or did the planting of the p on the 5th string cause a lot of noise while you were moving the hand around (assuming you did have it planted)?

Also curious to hear about the lifting you mention - I have had that happen a lot while playing free stroke (I think almost everyone goes through a phase of battling that issue), but not a lot while doing rest stroke. Were you planting the p on the bass strings? (this is basically the same question from the paragraph above, haha!)

Mehmet very cool! Happy to hear my trick worked for you! And wow, combining advice from different sources (in this case, different livestreams, albeit from the same teacher) - this is how professionals do it  I am very impressed!

As for playing 24 notes in a 4-beat measure (that's what you meant, right?), those would be sextuplets (my little students always chuckle when I say this word ).

The names go like this:

• duplets (yes, you can have duplets in ternary time signatures, like 3/8 or 6/8)
• triplets
• quadruplets
• quintuplets
• sextuplets
• septuplets
• etc.

Mehmet my pleasure! 

Desi Husband Awesome job, Desi! Congratulations on joining the challenge and sticking with it despite the lack of time! (I know exactly how you feel, I have to fight through that every day, myself!)

Very cool though - this sort of observations (free stroke being easier with i, m and rest stroke being easier with p) represent the most important step towards achieving good technique: awareness! Just out of curiosity, do you play with fingernails?