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The Secret Life of Cello Strings: A Cello Harmonics Tutorial

April 30, 2022 by Jonathan
Left Hand, Pedagogy, Practice, Shifting, Technique

 

The Secret Life of Cello Strings: Harmonics for Cellists - Cello Life Blog - Jonathan Simmons, cello

The Secret Life of Cello Strings: Harmonics for Cellists

 

The Secret Life of Cello Strings – what a title!

This indispensible book by R. Caroline Bosanquet begins with a foreword by Janos Starker who calls the book “both amusing and amazing” – high praise from such a master of the instrument. The book breaks down both the notation and explanation of harmonics so that anyone from beginning cellists to seasoned professionals can benefit from it.

Why study harmonics?

Harmonics allow us to map the fingerboard. See this previous blog post that explores the use of harmonics as one of three landmarks that aid us in shifting and thoroughly mapping the fingerboard. Demystifying where the harmonics are on the cello and what notes sound when we play them aid us as we navigate everything from the neck positions to the stratosphere of the possible pitches on the instrument and everything in between.

In an effort to make the book more applicable to visual learners, I have created a video tutorial to the pieces in the book. Here is the introduction video with some more information.

What does the book contain?

The book breaks down technical and acoustical language like “nodes” and “partials” to help explain where the harmonics are on the string and why they produce those high pitches.

Lest you be daunted thinking that harmonics are beyond your ability to understand or play, the book breaks down harmonics so that even the harmonics in second and third position are covered.

Most cellists learn the octave or halfway harmonic first, but there are a host of other harmonics across the instrument. Harmonics have the unique quality of getting higher the further they are from the center string. That means that certain notes can be found in multiple places on the same string. Number 4 in the book entitled “Changing Places” demonstrates this concept nicely in the video below.

See additional demonstration videos at this link. The full first chapter is available as of this writing, and new videos will be added weekly.

If you would like to purchase your own copy of the book, you can find it here. I would love to hear your feedback, so feel free to write a comment below or through the contact page on the website.

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©2022 by Jonathan Simmons. All rights reserved.

Strategies for Speed

January 30, 2021 by Jonathan
Equipment, Pedagogy, Practice

            Once we master the notes and rhythms of a piece, the daunting challenge awaits of speeding up the piece to performance tempo. This process often consumes a large amount of time and can often be frustrating when we get stuck at a certain tempo. Many times it feels like the piece will never reach full tempo. Let’s look at the appropriate time to begin speeding up a piece and three strategies to help overcome the tempo roadblock and truly master playing quickly.

            The first questions we must ask are, “At what tempo can I play the hardest part accurately?” and, “What is my goal tempo?” Too often we do not know what tempo we have already achieved or which parts tend to fall behind if we were to check with the metronome. (As a side note, all of these activities require a metronome, so if you don’t have one GET ONE. If a tempo is not indicated in the sheet music, listen to some recordings, or seek your teacher’s advice on a suitable and realistic tempo. Once you have ascertained a baseline tempo at which you can perform all parts of the piece or movement accurately and consistently, we will build from there. Here are three strategies to use in gaining concert tempo.

Speeding Up - Metronome - Cello Life Blog

To Gain Speed…Bump Up the Metronome

            The most commonly used strategies in speeding up music is to simply bump up the metronome a few clicks per minute. If you can play the piece, hard parts and all with the metronome at ♩=60, you can probably play it at ♩=65. Continue increasing the metronome a few clicks at a time until the music goes by so fast that you can no longer play accurately. At that point, slow down the metronome by a few clicks and continue getting comfortable at your maximum speed. Don’t simply speed ahead and accept mistakes. Find your comfort level and be prepared to push that level the next time you sit down to practice.

Two things to note:

1. Don’t get frustrated. If you hit a maximum speed and cannot overcome it, take a break and come back later.

2. Don’t expect the same level of proficiency the next time you pick up your instrument. Forgetting happens quickly. It is not unusual to feel like you are starting from the same slow tempo for several days in a row. With daily practice, you will be able to speed up the piece, but it may not happen the first (or second, or third!) time you pick up the instrument. This is normal, so do not be alarmed if (when) this is the case for you.

To Gain Speed…Add a Note 

            The Add a Note strategy gives the right hand practice at tempo while the left hand slowly adds the notes. Here is a short example of the Add a Note strategy at work.

First pick one of the hard spots which tends to be difficult playing quickly compared with the work as a whole. 

Speeding up Hungarian Rhapsody - Cello Life Blog
David Popper Hungarian Rhapsody

 Notice that we start with a short segment, as this strategy works best when used with small portions of music.

            To begin, we will take just the first note and play it with the rhythm of the passage, straight 16th notes in this case. The metronome should be set significantly faster than you can play the passage comfortably, even up to final performance tempo. 

Cello Life Blog - Jonathan Simmons - Add a note for speed
Step 1

As you continue, simply add one note at a time until you are playing the passage as originally written. 

Jonathan Simmons - Cello Life Blog - Add a Note Step 2
Step 2 – add the 2nd note
Jonathan Simmons Cello Life Blog - Add a Note Step 3
Step 3 – add the 3rd note

To Reach Concert Tempo…Practice Rhythms  

            In addition to Add a Note, we can speed up the music by playing all the notes yet altering the rhythms. These rhythms work best in perpetual motion passages like the one above, but can be applied to many different types of rhythmic passages. Different rhythms are applied to simple meter (where the bottom number of the time signature is 2 or 4) and compound meter (where the bottom number of the time signature is 8). Here are examples of the rhythms to use in order to speed up passages in each of these meters. Let’s first start with the passage from Hungarian Rhapsody as an example.

Jonathan Simmons Cello Life Blog - Hungarian Rhapsody
As written

            The first practice rhythms we could apply are dotted figures. Make one note long and the next note short at a quicker tempo than you could play all the notes as written. When written out, these practice rhythms would look like this:

Practice Dotted Rhythms to Speed up Music
Practice Rhythm 1 – Dotted Note First
Practice Dotted Rhythms to Speed up Music 2
Practice Rhythm 2 – Dotted Note Second

Once the first two practice rhythms are mastered, move on to playing more notes up to tempo. In the next practice rhythms, only one note per beat is altered. By this point, you are already playing three out of four notes at or near tempo!

Speed up notes 2-4
Practice Rhythm 3 – First Note Long
Speed up notes 1, 3-4
Practice Rhythm 4 – Second Note Long
Speed up notes 1-2, 4
Practice Rhythm 5 – Third Note Long
Speed up notes 1-3
Practice Rhythm 6 – Fourth Note Long

                        Now onto compound meter. Music in this meter being divided into an odd number of three, different practice rhythms must be employed. Two of the three notes can be sped up at once. The following example show three possible practice rhythms.

Rhythm as Written
Practice Rhythm 1 – First Note Long
Practice Rhythm 2 – Last Note Long
Practice Rhythm 3 – Middle Note Long

Gaining speed is an ongoing process, but these three strategies of employing the metronome, adding a note, and utilizing practice rhythms can help speed the journey along. For more great tips on practicing, a wonderful resource is the book Practicing for Artistic Success. Many more techniques for speeding up music can be found in the book.

I hope you feel more ready to begin speeding up your music having read this post. Happy practicing, and let me know how it goes!

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©2021 by Jonathan Simmons. All rights reserved.

 

Rules I Break (Part 1 of 2)

December 7, 2020 by Jonathan
Left Hand, Pedagogy, Practice, Technique

Beginning cellists learn all sorts of necessary ground rules as they begin learning the instrument – how to sit, how to hold the cello, where to place the hands, etc. These rules are useful for establishing healthy habits for playing, but strict rules do not necessarily take into account the variety of techniques needed to play the infinite variety of music cellists are called upon to perform. Below are a few of the of the left hand rules that I break with the next blog post will focus on the right hand rules.

Rule #1: Left Thumb behind the neck

I first learned to place the left hand by putting the thumb directly under the other four fingers on the strings.

Cello Life Blog Jonathan Simmons - Left Hand Rules

Many times, this place is as good as any for the thumb. However, by no means is it the only place the thumb can stay. The thumb can move to either side of the neck for various reasons.

Moving the thumb to the left side of the neck can help combat a squeezing thumb, especially on the two higher strings. Squeezing becomes much more difficult (though not impossible) when the thumb would be squeezing to the right rather than up against the opposing fingers.

Cello Life Blog Jonathan Simmons - Left Thumb Rules
Practice moving the thumb to the left side of the neck when you feel the urge to squeeze. Learning to use arm weight instead of thumb counter pressure to hold down the strings will relax the left hand allowing you to play more freely and for longer periods of time without fatigue.

In addition, resting the thumb on the right side of the neck can also serve to our advantage. For example, when playing on the C string, you may find moving the thumb to the right side of the neck is helpful. Students often arch the wrist in an effort to reach the lower strings without touching the upper strings. Resting the thumb on the left side of the neck in this instance would only exacerbate the problem by keeping the wrist further from the neck than it could be.

Bad Left Hand Rule
Negative Example


Instead experiment with bringing the thumb to the other side of the neck. This allows the entire wrist and hand to come closer to the notes that the fingers need to reach.

Cello Life Blog Jonathan Simmons - Left Hand Rules 1

Rule #2: Thumb over 2 strings in thumb position

In thumb position, many students are told to keep the thumb over two strings. Many cello methods including Rick Mooney’s book Thumb Position for Cello advocate this habit. In general, placing the thumb over two strings is a beneficial habit to adopt. However, certain circumstances can require removing the thumb from one string or the other in order to play the music, especially for cellists with smaller hands. Two examples of this are open strings and large stretches.

An extreme example of open strings used while the left hand is in thumb position can be found in the Ligeti Solo Sonata. In the following section, the thumb can either rest on one string, the D string, or can come off both strings.

Personally I anchor my thumb on the side of the fingerboard to provide a reference point for the rest of the hand while raising all of the fingers during the open string notes.

For cellists with small hands, everything we can do to reach another centimeter is necessary on the instrument. Take this stretch in the Ligeti Sonata for instance.

 

With my small hands, I have trouble reaching the major seventh from A up to G# with the thumb over both the A and the D strings. When I place my thumb only on the A string, the elbow is able to come around just enough to enable the extra reach up to the G#. Large stretches sometimes necessitate breaking the rule of resting the left thumb over two strings in thumb position.

As you are practicing, experiment with what rules might need to be broken. Endless curiosity is a must! Let me know what you discover.

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©2020 by Jonathan Simmons. All rights reserved.

 

Slow Practice vs. Slow Motion Practice

October 17, 2020 by Jonathan
Pedagogy, Practice

         

            “Practice slowly.” It’s something we have all heard from our teachers, but all too often this advice comes without demonstration of different types of slow practice or how our practice goals should differ from fast practice. Despite the countless hours we spend practicing slowly over the course of our lives, do we truly understand how to get the most out of our slow practice?

Only after several years of playing cello was I introduced to two different types of practice: slow practice and slow motion practice. Today we will focus on how we practice, specifically how we practice slowly.

 

 

Slow Practice

            Slow practice helps us to learn music accurately no matter whether our current playing level is beginner or professional. As we will define it today, slow practice is not only under tempo but also commonly narrows our focus by removing certain aspects of the music including bowings or dynamics. With these factors removed, we are free to narrow our focus to other aspects of the music. For example, we can simply focus on finding the notes. Especially in the early stages of learning a piece, we need to devote slow practice time to just making sure we can hear the piece in our heads and have ideal fingerings for finding the notes. This is often easiest at a slow tempo with free rhythm.

            As a subset of notes, intonation can be another focus of slow practice. Slowly practicing with a tuner without vibrato develops our sense of equal temperament, giving us opportunity to go back and forth in between notes that we miss. We can also check fingered notes against harmonics and as double stops with open strings to test the intonation.

            In addition slow practice aids our ears in developing good tone. Practicing slowly magnifies our idiosyncrasies, so any weaknesses in technique or phrasing becomes much easier to hear. For this reason, many students do not like to practice slowly, thinking that they make more mistakes when they practice under tempo. In reality playing slowly only exposes what was there all along. When we practice slowly, we actually make fewer mistakes in general, although our ears pick up more of them.

            Slow practice also gives an opportunity to work out tricky rhythms using the metronome. This can happen while sitting at the instrument, but just as often, try clapping and counting away from the cello. When unencumbered with thoughts about all the technical details described above, our full focus is free to tackle the rhythmical challenges we face.

Slow Motion Practice

            Learning the difference between slow practice and slow motion practice was a game-changer for me. Practicing in slow motion differs from slow practice in several ways.

            In contrast with slow practice, slow motion practice observes all the markings in the music as in a performance. In essence slow motion practice would appear as if you were playing back a recorded performance of the piece at a fraction of the performance tempo. All musical elements would remain the same, and even more importantly all your motions would be identical. When playing slowly, we have a (healthy) tendency to use larger motions. In slow motion practice, we want to be attentive to and imitate the motionsused when playing quickly. If you use one inch of bow per note at tempo, you will still use that same amount of bow when playing slow motion. If you prepare your left arm for a shift two notes before the shift, you will do the same in slow motion practice. Below is a written example of a passage as it would be practice both slowly and in slow motion.

Valentini Sonata


            This first picture shows the passage (an excerpt from the Valentini Sonata) as written along with the notes that we will emphasize in slow practice. I can attest that these measures require some practice! Next let us look at how the first measure might look when practiced slowly.          

Slow Practice


Notice a few things – first, the slurs and articulations are gone. As we focus on the notes, we don’t need to think about everything at once. Second, notice that we are playing very slowly, approximately four times as slow, because the first measure is stretched into four measures. The notes don’t line up exactly, and that is one of the joys of slow practice. They don’t need to! The first two notes line up with the previous example. However the first bracketed note is longer. This D# is a bit of a stretch on cello, so it is good to check it for intonation. That note is repeated again for good measure before the notes go back to straight quarters. As we reach the D# again in the third measure, we again repeat it searching for perfect intonation. After that the notes again line up with the above example until the final bracket. Note that the bracketed notes are repeated. As we feel confident, we can speed through the notes, assuming they are accurate. Finally let’s see how slow motion practice might look.

Slow Motion Practice


         Both bowing (slurs) and articulation (staccato) have returned. In addition, the notes correlate exactly to the original excerpt one for one. This version of slow motion practice happens to be in half notes instead of quarter notes, but this does not necessarily need to be so. What we would also keep consistent beyond the notes is identical motions. Because the passage will be played near the balance point when up to tempo, when played in half notes, we will also play it in the same part of the bow. Whether we choose to play the passage on or off the string at tempo, the same style will apply when practiced slow motion.  

            As you play slow motion, as yourself questions about the music and the movements you make. How high am I lifting my fingers above the fingerboard? Am I pacing the crescendo the way I would like? Does my bow hand tense at the thought of fast passages? The answers will illuminate what needs further attention and will help you play faster and more accurately than trying to blaze through the piece at full tempo. Practicing this way brings to light not only what sounds we produce but also how we physically generate the sound.

            I hope these insights are helpful to you in practice. I know the transformation they made was astounding for me. Consider recording yourself in slow motion practice. You will gain even further insight into the habits you never even knew you had.

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©2020 by Jonathan Simmons. All rights reserved.  

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  • The Secret Life of Cello Strings: A Cello Harmonics Tutorial
  • Strategies for Speed
  • Rules I Break (Part 2 of 2) – Right Hand
  • Rules I Break (Part 1 of 2)

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