Week 1 - Technical Foundation // May 3

Nora Torres-Nagel hi Nora! Congrats on posting the video, you've done such a great job recording it, uploading it on YouTube, and posting it here! Thank you so much to all our lovely fellow community members who helped - this has been so wonderful to read here!

Now, when it comes to your preparation questions: I see what you mean!

The first part of what I have to tell you will be the very same as I told Eric - however, my advice for you on how to actually fix it is very different. Let's start with the part that is the same: 

It seems like the problem you're facing is that since you've not practiced preparation for a very long time, you are having trouble incorporating it on top of the way of playing that you've been doing for a very long time.

Basically, playing with preparation requires your hand to do certain things, while practicing without preparation requires your hand to do different things. When you try to switch from one to the other, you're "restricting yourself" as if you were playing the same way as before, but you're also not yet getting the benefits that come with playing the other way.

Basically, when experimenting with new technique, you are always going to experience a "J-curve" - it will feel worse worse before it feels better.

Like I was telling Eric:

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, when it comes to my actual advice for you here: I see two problems.

Number 1: The first problem (and by far the most important one), is that you are correctly preparing the fingers on the strings at the beginning of the chord, however, before you actually play them, you are taking the fingers off of the strings again.

This is very important to avoid. Once you've placed the fingers on the strings, don't let them move away before you play the notes!

Use your left hand if you need to - feel free to take your left hand and place it on top of your a finger once you've prepared it on the string. Then, don't let the a finger escape! Don't let it move away from the string once you've placed it there.

Otherwise, you are not getting any benefit from preparation at all - you are only stopping the strings and then introducing a lot of unnecessary additional movement. If you manage to fix this, you'll be able to get some of the benefits of playing with preparation - right now, you are only getting disadvantages out of it.

Number 2: The second (and much less important) issue is that preparing all fingers on the string takes you quite a long time and makes you go out of tempo.

There is a real simple fix here: play this exercise much slower than you do now, to the point where you can prepare your fingers without going out of tempo. Perhaps twice as slowly.

More importantly, in addition to practicing slowly, you also need to start with exercise 1A - this exercise is the basis for the one that you are playing in your video.

Playing with preparation basically means moving away from playing individual notes and into playing block chords. So in these exercises, what we want to do is basically to convert the feeling of playing individual notes into the feeling you get in your right hand when you play exercise 1A.

Therefore, my last suggestion for you is to not practice any exercise before you practice 1A - and to look for that 1A feeling throughout every single other arpeggio exercise I showed you this week.

Let me know if this helps and please, feel free to upload as many videos as you want for me to give you feedback on!