Week 1 - Technical Foundation // May 3

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!!

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!