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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Practice guide
The exercises I've gone through during today's livestream, and which I encourage you to practice and post here, are the following:
Use open strings or the left-hand chord pattern from page 1, measure 7, on the following exercises:
- 1A (page 1) - medium tempo, with or without metronome
- Optional: 1C (page 1) - medium tempo, with or without metronome
- 2A (page 1) - medium to fast tempo, with or without metronome
- 2B (page 1) - medium tempo, with or without metronome (6/16 or 3/8)
Use either open strings, the original Villa-Lobos chord pattern, or the left-hand chord pattern from page 3, measure 25 on the following exercise:
- 4E (page 3) - slow to medium tempo, no metronome
Practice the following scale exercises:
- 3B (page 2) - medium to fast, with metronome
- 3A (page 2) - slow to fast, with metronome
- 3C (page 2) - slow to fast, with metronome
- Optional: 5A (page 5) - medium to fast, with metronome
Use the left-hand chord pattern from page 4, measure 51, on the following exercise:
- 5B (page 5) - slow to medium, no metronome
Again, there is no expectation here that you would be practicing everything every single day. Feel free to focus on just one or a few of these exercises.
These are only meant to give you a "ceiling" - basically, to make sure that those of you who are exceptionally ambitious don't run out of things to practice for the rest of the challenge.
We will dive into piece excerpts next session (May 10th).
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I am not sure what I did. If I wrote to you already in german or not. Anyway I begin again in english. How can I the videos "hochladen" on the community page. I use Quicktime Player for the videos. I have never used Youtube for that but I can learn if necessary. Can I loaded them as "Anlage" directly? they are very heavy...Thanks again for yesterday!
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Sorry to start like this, Mircea, but surely you meant the RIGHT-hand exercise book? Just not to get confused from the beginning...
BTW, awesome idea. Thank you very much for your support. Mircea said:
Download the sheet music: in this first week, we will be working with materials from my right-hand technique workshop. Download them here:
Left-hand exercise book (<- click)-
Igor hahah you are totally right Igor! I did mean right-hand
sorry about that!
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Hi Mircea, there is an excellent proposal
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Giuseppe Gasparini thank you Giuseppe! Hope to see you around in this challenge
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Hi Mircea,
I have a question. I only had formal classical guitar lessons with a teacher for three years, and that was about 30 years ago, when I was in undergraduate college. Neither of my two teachers ever taught me about right-hand preparation (or if they did, I must have ignored them!). When I try to do it, it feels almost impossibly unnatural. I literally cannot even go at half the speed I go at when I don't prepare. My tone is pretty horrible too, with my nails often catching and "twanging" the strings when I prepare the right hand. It makes me feel like a I'm three years old!
So I guess I want to know what you suggest I do. Should I do the exercises you gave with preparation and just push through it, hoping practice will make it better with time? Should I learn the basics of right-hand preparation from another source before I do this virtuosity challenge? Should I just ignore it and do the challenge without preparation? Any thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Eric
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Eric Hi Eric! This sounds like it's quite difficult for you, I'm sorry to hear! You could try to upload a video of yourself playing the same short exercise excerpt once with preparation and once without... this might help us get to the root of the problem.
Does it happen whenever you prepare full chords (p, i, m, a) or also when simply resting the thumb on the bass strings while the other fingers are playing?
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Mircea Thanks for getting back to me. Here is a video of me playing 2B (I said 2A in the video, but it's actually 2B). Any thoughts you have would be appreciated. Maybe I just need to practice the planting more.
BTW, I created the video as Unlisted, which I've never done before. Let me know if I did it wrong.
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Eric
I have the same problem Eric. what do you think Mircea?
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Eric
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Eric sorry I am trying to load my file but does not work....
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Eric
2A.mov
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Eric lets wait for Mircea explanation about the planting. I would like to know more about the block (i-m-a) planting at the same time as the thumb. I can understand the stability and preparation concept but you would probably never be able to reach speed since one of your fingers will always have to do a double plucking, like in 1C, 2A and 2B your i finger plucks twice in a row. I think It would make more sense if at least you block (i-m-a) plant at the same time than you pluck the i finger, then you no longer have pluck twice in a row for any fingers.
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Blaise Laflamme hi Blaise. That’s the way I used to plant before learning Mircea’s method. I would play p and when it’s i’s turn I’d plant m and a together with i. I always thought that gave it a nice flow without cutting off the sound of the treble strings too early. But I’m trying it Mircea’s way to see what difference it makes for me.
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Debbie yes sure, I'm trying it out too as an exercise, it's always a good thing to revisit what and how we do! On my side I always end up using what makes more sense music-wise, and since music is mostly legato by default, as opposed to a specific staccato notation or implicit style, the finger preparation breaks the legato my ears expect to hear!
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Blaise Laflamme yes I agree with you there. I remember Mircea answering a similar question in the livestream of the right hand exercises and I think I may have asked it! He said something to the effect of the stability he gets from the full preparation outweighs the slight stop of the sound especially at faster tempos because it is so imperceptible. I think of it as another tool in the toolbox that if I can do it well I can employ it as needed.
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Debbie yes I agree with the stability point at low or moderate speed but at high speed I'm a bit sceptic, for myself at least, about the double pluck/plant efficiency of one of i-m-a (depending of the pattern) with the thumb? Also the full preparation seems to prevent the use of other fixations than the finger's ones, like the wrist or the elbow, and god knows I use my forearm a lot!
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Blaise Laflamme I just thought of a good test. Villa-Lobos Prelude no. 4 that diminished chord that goes up and down the neck. We can test and see which technique is faster and legato
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Eric hi Eric! Thank you for posting the video. There are a couple of things to say here - let's take them one by one.
First of all, I don't think you're doing a bad job at all playing the excerpt with preparation. Yes, it is slower, and yes, it is more tense (we'll come back to that later), but it mostly feels weird to you, rather than actually sounding weird or bad, externally. I know this problem, because I've gone through it myself.
When I started using preparation in my own right hand, it felt like nothing else I had tried before - and any "revolution" of one's own technique, no matter how minor, can cause us to feel like we suddenly don't know how to play our instrument anymore. It's weird, but the weirdness goes away after a few weeks of practice, and only after sticking with it for a while can we truly compare the two versions.
This is why changing technique is a difficult thing - we can't make a judgement on what is easier and what is harder before we practice both versions for a while. This does mean that the first step to incorporate new elements into our technique is to blindly jump into something that someone else says it works, and invest quite a bit of practice time in trying it out before we can truly and accurately compare things. This is why trusting our teachers is so important at this stage.
Now, on a more granular level, what I see happening here is that you are tensing the a finger while in the middle of the pattern. You can see it quite obviously in certain places, like at 1:48 - you see how the a finger gets straightened out?
This means that the finger itself is getting tense, probably because you've never "asked" it to stay on a string while other fingers are playing. To fix this, you need to find the angle of attack where the right hand can comfortably play all four notes without requiring any tension.
So, although the tension is mostly in the a finger right now, the way to fix it is to actually change the position of your right hand to an angle from which you can keep the palm in place while the other fingers are playing (rather than having to move the hand for each note).
When you demonstrated the "no-preparation" version of your hand at the beginning of the video, the hand was bouncing around a bit, which shows me that you've basically never practiced playing an entire 4-string arpeggio pattern without using the movement of the arm a little bit to help you reach all four notes.
Through the preparation, you are basically forcing your hand to stay in one place and try to play everything from there, and since you haven't yet found an angle in which this is comfortable, your fingers are making up for it by tensing up. (Seen most clearly in the a finger in your video.)
I've made a video to demonstrate. Experiment with moving the palm up and down, and then forward and backward, as shown in the video, and you might find the angle from which all four strings can be played without requiring any extra tension in the hand.
Once you find that, you will feel that all the unnecessary movement in your hand has gone away, and that is when you'll finally get to experience the "energy savings" and incredible stability benefits of preparation.
Check this out:
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Blaise Laflamme it depends, there are situations in which preparing can slow you down a little, but also situations in which it actually allows you to play a lot faster. Here's an example:
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Mircea I agree with the block concept and how you can play a lot faster when thinking as a block action instead of each fingers.
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Mircea about being slower with preparation I was referring more about a pattern like p-i-m-a-m-i where the i will have to do 3 actions in a row, the last plucked i, followed by the plant with the thumb and then the following plucked i to restart the pattern. I do understand the benefits of fingers preparation, that make sense, I would say that somehow over the years I managed to create a «kind» of preparation by using my fingers as a whole, or as a block, that helped me a lot to secure my hand. Thanks again for the explanation!
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Blaise Laflamme My pleasure Blaise! Thanks for explaining - that makes sense!
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Mircea Wow! That was an incredibly thoughtful and thorough reply! Your analysis of my problem and explanation of the remedy are very clear. Now all that's left is for me to get practicing.
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End of the Year Challenge: Finish Strong!
