Week 1 - Technical Foundation // May 3
Welcome to the Main Thread for the first week of the virtuosity challenge! This is the place to discuss the Week 1 livestream and post your Week 1 practice updates.
- Make sure you've read the guidelines before replying (<- click)
- Watch the kickoff livestream for help with the first section!
Download the sheet music: in this first week, we will be working with materials from my right-hand technique workshop. Download them here:
Right-hand exercise book (<- click)
See the pinned post below for a specific practice guide featuring all the exercises we talked about during today's livestream!
Since this challenge is all about virtuosity, video updates are more highly encouraged than usual. Feel free to upload the video in the reply OR simply link to your YouTube video.
YouTube video submissions CAN be unlisted. Just make sure they're not set on "private", so we can actually see them.
If you want to describe your process, feel free to use the following template.
- Exercise(s) you have been working on:
- Things you found easy:
- Things you found difficult:
↓ Reply below with your submissions and questions! ↓
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Mircea and @ everybody first of all thank you for correcting me as much as you can, you will have to fast fwd in places, also I taped myself in 2 positions for some exercises. Apologies and thank you!
The easiest thing after a week of daily practice is still the preparation, it feels very natural to me
The most difficult: left hand seems to slow me down more in the arpeggios, while the right hand seems to slow me down more in the scales. In the apoyando scales I still produce a noise, just when my finger touches de string (bzz) to plug and kill the previous note....
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Marek Tabisz Marek thank you for watching!!! you deserve points for this haha, thank you truly
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Emma Brava!!!
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Emma This time I won't go crazy with points - ha ha ha!!
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Emma really liked it Emma. Nice sound and relaxation. Beautiful job!
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Hello everyone! Hope you're doing well and practicing a lot. Well, I haven't got too much time to practice these past three days, but before I was focusing mostly on the arpeggios exercises and not so much in all the apoyando ones. But still, I have improved a bit my apoyando technique, as well as my arpeggios, Mircea's guidance has been really helpfull!
- Things you've found easy: mostly, the preparation, it did my life so much easier
- Things you've found difficult: during the rests strokes I used to get my i finger oftenly caught on the string, so when speeding up the notes it didn't were so even, but today I lowered my nails and it sounded like it might were fixed, but still, I have to keep practicing to ensure . I think I tense a bit sometimes when going to the next string during rest stroke.
In the video I play exercises 2A, 2B, and 3B. I'm not so happy with my tone
By the way, if you are wondering what my guitar "rest" is, it's a tool given to kids that do swimming, specifically for a swimming style. It does a bit its duty haha
have a nice practice! -
Daniel Great job! So happy to hear that taking part in this has been helping!
2A and 2C: really good job on the preparation - this is looking and sounding great!
Rest stroke: I see what you mean - yes, it does seem like the i is not quite as agile as the m. This is something you'll be able to fix through practice, almost nobody has perfectly even i and m fingers right from the start.
Two things you could do to try to fix this:
- Make the i finger leave the string faster (making the movement more automatic). Looking at your recordings, it seems the m has a very easy time "automating" its movement away from the string while the i is playing, but the i has a much harder time doing the same thing when m is playing.
- Try to force the i finger to go further away from the string, for example by applying the trick I showed you in-stream, where you hold your left-hand index finger in front of your i and m, and you then try to "slap" your left-hand finger with both i and m as you play open strings. You'll notice the m currently has an easier time "slapping", while the i will need some more work.
Wonderful job overall and thank you for posting!
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Mircea thanks a lot! I find incredible how you saw that issue of my i finger, because, yeah, I was focusing mostly on my m finger, I looked that it was a bit difficult to do the return motion with it. So I tried out your exercise of slaping my left hand index and that was very helpfull, but didn't concentrate that much on my i finger. I'm gonna try it right now!
Huge thanks!
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Daniel Happy to hear, Daniel! Thanks for giving it a go
- Things you've found easy: mostly, the preparation, it did my life so much easier
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First of all, well done to everyone who has posted videos and updates. It's really wonderful to see how many talented musicians are taking part in these challenges (myself excluded).
Exercises I have been working on: 1a, 2a, 2b, 4e, 3a, 3b, 3c, 5b. I have been doing a number of Mircea's exercises for a long time now (since his first livestream on Facebook) as part of my daily routine (1a, 2b, 2c, 4a, 4b and 2a) and I alternate between 3c and 5b but recently I have done these with m,a instead of i,m. I also do some other scale exercises and Scott Tennant's daily workout for the left hand. It would be interesting to hear Mircea's comments as I am probably just perfecting my bad habits.
What I found easy. The arpeggios I think I am OK with and planting
What I found hard: Increaing the spped and playing with the metronome in 3a and 3b
Some videos below
https://youtu.be/mJA9dA1_MX0 - exercise 3a
https://youtu.be/Tu8eH-mLFgw -exercise 3b
https://youtu.be/oYXiY-J-szE - exercise 5b part 1 - run out of time to do the rest
https://youtu.be/pDw3zxA0jm8 - arpeggio exercises
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Derek your videos are in private mode instead of unlisted then we can't play out any of them
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Blaise Laflamme Hi Blaise - thanks for spotting this - I was in a bot of a hurry. I've set them to unlisted - could you please check they are OK - they work for me in both modes.
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Derek yep... all up now! thanks and good job!
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Blaise Laflamme HI Blaise - thanks very much
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Derek thank you so much for posting these! And wow - I'm so happy to hear you've been practicing these exercises ever since my first tonebase livestream on Facebook - back when I was just learning how to stream, in the long forgotten days of April 2020
incredible! 3A: very good job! Remember to also practice with the metronome sometimes, just to make sure the last scale (the simple chromatic one) is in the same tempo as all the others. You are doing great on this though! No bad habits to speak of
3B: great job on this one too! Not much I can say on this. Sometimes, the i causes a bit more noise than the m - I feel like the i has a bit of a harder time playing than the m. But I don't think this is a big problem in any of the exercises I've seen you do!
5B: really good job here too! I can see you've been practicing this for a while - the experience and security speak for themselves! One tiny detail: it seems like you're moving the palm a lot to change between the 1st and the 2nd strings. This might not be entirely necessary in an exercise like this, where you're only ever going to stay on these two strings. Try to challenge yourself to also play this one without the big palm movement between the strings! Not super important though.
1A: sounding great! One thing you could do to challenge yourself would be to start the movement from a little further away from the strings and use more of the big joint to play these chords rather than the arm. You might need to play slower for this. I'm kind of worried about telling you this though, since it's all already sounding so good. If it's too difficult, don't change it - it's working as it is!
2B: it's sounding great and the preparation is wonderful! Small thing I've noticed: when you finally play with the a, your hand tends to bounce a little. It's normal, since that's when we lose all contact to the string - just see if you can relax the arm a little more at that spot. Not a big deal, but might make things easier in the long run.
4E: great job!!
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Derek Bravo!!, it's a good job
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Well done to everyone who's posted exercises this week. I will try to watch as many as I can before tomorrow's live stream. It's been an eventful week for me and I haven't had as much time as I would like to practice. However, I have been through all the exercises enough to highlight where I need to work!
I found the arpeggios quiet easy - at least at slow speed - as I've used planting for many years.
My struggle with them and with the rest stroke scales is the tension that builds up as I increase the speed. On the rare occasions I manage to relax I can certainly tell the differences, but I find most times the tension just creeps up on me almost unnoticed, until I realise it's become a block to making progress. Any tips on how to practice relaxation/avoid tensions would be very welcome!
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Ron Hi Ron! It's good to hear from you - and happy to hear you've found the arpeggio preparation practice easy!
When it comes to the rest stroke tension creeping up on us - oh yes, that is the number 1 thing holding us all back. I know that feeling so well! One thing you might want to try is moving in a "non-linear" way through tempos. That is, going up 2 metronome marks, then 1 down, then 2 up, then 1 down, etc. So basically, something like: 96, 100, 104, 100, 104, 108, 104, 108, 112, 108, 112, 116, 112, 116, 120, 116, etc.! This little practice hack has helped me quite a bit over the years!
Thanks for posting and hope to see you around the forums the next couple of weeks!
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Ron You are not alone
, I have the same problem as you
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Giuseppe Gasparini Thanks Giuseppe - it's good to know I'm not alone! I'm going use Mircea's suggestion today. I think I will need to be patient as I know it will take time, but I'd like to feel that I'm making progress
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Mircea Many thanks Mircea. I'm going to give it a go today. I think I probably have to be more patient. Although I practiced the exercises after the original workshops I don't think I kept them going for long enough!
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Hey Guys, Sorry for the late submission (trouble with DaVinci) and length of this video, since It includes all the exercises we discussed. I'm not accustomed to doing string preparation like this, so these exercises are great to develop this skill. The challenge of coordinating this with both hands is apparent and I certainly need to continue working on this stuff. I believe the scale exercises and cross string alternation patterns are important for me to develop further to achieve greater speed and accuracy in scale passages. As you can see from the video, I need to continue these exercises to improve technique. ( I should probably memorize the patterns, so I can focus more carefully on execution - too many mistakes from loss of concentration).
Mircea, Thank you for providing us with these focused exercises for technique development and warm up routines. I believe they will yield significant results when practiced consistently.
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Barney Bravo!big work
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Giuseppe Gasparini Thanks Giuseppe! Bravo to you also for your continuing great work!
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Barney great job! Thanks for sending these in!! You are doing great in general - very beautiful tone and nothing strange going on in your hands, which is exactly what we are aiming for! You are way on your way to achieve the virtuosity that this challenge is all about
here are some more targeted comments: - 2A, 2B, 4E: Your preparation is just a little inconsistent here; it sometimes happens, other times it doesn't. It can be nice to practice alternating between full prep and no prep sometimes, but in this case, it doesn't seem very controlled. Try to really feel this exercise as an extension of 1A - we're doing the same thing (bringing the fingers to the strings all together, like if we were playing block chords), only difference being that we are playing the notes one by one rather than all at the same time. Sounding good though!
- 3A, 3B, 3C: Nice job here! Very little for me to say other than well done.
- 5B: Well done with the string changes, but be careful with the pattern: sometimes you change it midway through the exercise. It's important to really control this one - if you do repeats on every chord (which, I think you should), make sure you do them every time. And make sure you're not changing the pattern once you've started - it occurs sometimes here. Really good job overall though!
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Mircea Thank you for watching carefully. I appreciate your kind words and targeted advice!!
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