5 Rules for Practicing Double Stops

[Music] [Applause] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] double stops [Music] and of course the best way for you to perfect your double stops or any other technique that you might be working on is to put yourself under the regular tutelage of a private teacher and of course that is what we do here at murphy music academy so if you're interested in setting yourself up with a free trial lesson with one of our teachers then please shoot an email to admin murphymusicacademy.org link will be in the description below and we are also offering viola and cello lessons now rule number one the only difference between playing one string and two is the angle of the bow something i strive to do in my teaching and in these videos is to what i call demystify violin technique now playing the violin is already a very difficult enterprise even if you're just doing basic technique let alone more advanced technique but a lot of the difficulty of playing the violin comes from our heads more than it comes from our arms so if there are things we can do to change how we think that makes the task for our arms that much easier is something we definitely want to do one of the cues that i found to be most helpful in teaching students how to play double stops correctly is to say okay the motion of the bow is going to be exactly the same the bow technique is going to be exactly the same nothing special has to happen here in the bow arm the only thing that has to change is you are now going to angle the bow from here to here everything else is going to remain exactly the same and you might think wow that seems like a really kind of very obvious thing to say but you'd be surprised at how often someone when they first start to play double stops in you might have experienced this yourself starts to behave as if their bow technique should be completely different just because their bow happens to be touching two strings at the same time something i've noticed after playing violin for a few decades and now of course teaching it as a full-time job is that really getting better at violin is merely a progression of becoming more simple in your playing simplifying everything that you're doing beginners do way too much that is the hallmark of a beginner there's just way too much motion nothing is streamlined they're always doing more than they have to the better you get the less you have to do and this is important in what we're talking about right now because often the simplest ideas what seem like the most obvious ideas when you hear them can make some of the biggest differences so if you're struggling with evenness in your double stops then what you want to focus on is just maintaining the angle of the bow while trying to do what is essentially the exact same bow technique you would do on a single string now of course one of the best ways to get your double stops more even is to practice open strings but i would actually start out with practicing single strings before going into double stops and the reason for that is is when we practice we try to keep our bow hopefully straight this way and not get crooked like this we try to more or less make sure the bow doesn't move around in different sounding points unless of course we want to play at a different sounding point but there's another aspect of this side of keeping the bow straight or in the same place that we often neglect and that is when we play a single string we have a little bit of wiggle room this way so when you practice open string exercises you should practice keeping the bow essentially pointed at the same spot of the wall for the entirety of the stroke and not for it to wobble around like this during the stroke [Music] you might find that very difficult at first if you've never thought about it but once you can do that then moving the bow to the next angle and playing both strings at the same time is going to be a lot easier rule number two just because you are playing two strings at the same time does not mean that you should press the bow into the strings twice as hard in fact i would say you should do exactly the opposite whenever you're starting to practice a double stop passage or scale that you're not familiar with start playing actually a little bit lighter than you normally would now the reason for this is twofold and the first thing that i want to talk about that this will help is the mental aspect of this if you are starting to practice some difficult double stop passage you probably feel very uncomfortable and when you're playing something that is a little bit uncomfortable you want to do anything you can to encourage yourself to be relaxed and loose and the natural tendency we have when we get uncomfortable to press in harder actually exacerbates our problems with playing loosely now the second aspect of why we want to practice with very light bow and practicing a double stop passage is oral okay so if i'm focusing on committing myself to playing with very light bow then all of my tone production has to come from what we talked about in the first point evenness okay i can't force the tone production and because this is very unforced it also leaves up a lot of brain power for me to use in everything else that i am doing with the rest of my body here so the bow actually becomes a non-factor okay it is just there producing the tones that i'm listening to gives me a lot more chance to tune without thinking about anything else that i'm doing [Music] i can focus on my hand and making sure that everything's in tune i can focus on my vibrato i can focus more on my shifting anything else i want to focus on gets a lot more brain power and we only have so much to spare with everything that we're doing so the less that i have to think about what's happening here the better and then once you get a lot more comfortable with what's happening here you can start to play with a lot more energy and force in the bow but if you set yourself up in the beginning with this very light bow not only are you going to be a lot less hectic about it you're going to feel a lot less tense you're also just going to have a much better time practicing because you'll be able to hear and focus on the things you need to hear and focus on when practicing double stops now rule number three finally brings us to the left hand side of things but we're going to start out with something very similar to rule number two which is do not squeeze your fingers into the strings any more than you absolutely have to just like with the bow we have to avoid the tendency to go either consciously or subconsciously okay so two strings means twice as much pressure i would say almost the opposite is true though in the case of the left hand instead of with the bow where i'd say you might even try playing a little bit lighter when you're practicing double stops with the left hand i think you should keep just about the exact same amount of pressure on the strings as you would normally when playing one string at a time and if you've watched this channel for any period of time you might have noticed that i'm a big advocate of playing with as little pressure on the strings as you can possibly get away with now i didn't say to have a very very light pressure to the strings i didn't say to feather touch the strings i said to play with the finger pressure as lightly as you can get away with okay there's still going to be a little bit of weight a little bit of pressure on the strings but what you want to make sure you're not doing is squeezing the hand whenever you're playing either single notes or especially as we're talking today double stops now one of the reasons we tend to squeeze so much when we play double stops is really because we're trying to keep our fingers in the same place while we're doing the double stop especially if you're starting to do more complicated things like scales and thirds or octaves or especially fingered octaves we often feel okay well in this awkward position i have to force my finger to stay in that same place but that is actually the exact wrong approach to take when learning how to do these double stops and scales properly what you actually want to focus on when it comes to keeping the fingers in the same place and not having them move around once you've placed them on the strings is to develop horizontal finger independence okay so the ability of the fingers to be able to hold themselves in any way going up and down the fingerboard independently of the other fingers so really great exercise you can do for this at first is just two okay i'm gonna put all four fingers on the string and take one finger at a time and i'm not squeezing at all not squeezing at all can i more or less move one finger without bothering barely bothering the rest of the fingers okay if i'm able to do that without trying to pin the other fingers down then i'm going to have a little bit easier time being able to hold the fingers in the exact right positions without having to move around and place them on the strings without having to pin them down to the fingerboard learning to play this way is incredibly important for doing very difficult and awkward double stops like fingered octaves but also just generally for good facility when playing more difficult or faster double stop passages for example let's say you're going to play a major third followed by another major third what happens here let's just take b flat and d here okay is that the next major third would be c and e natural which means my e natural played by my second finger has to get very close to the b flat played by my third finger so i have to be able to control the motion of the fingers going inward and if i was really squeezing hard it'd be difficult to control that okay so looking from here but if i play very lightly with my fingers i have a much higher chance of hitting that and being in complete control of the motion of the fingers going into that very awkward third now to springboard off of what we were just talking about in terms of playing more awkward double stops rule number four any part of the finger you want to use is just fine again this is something i've talked about many times on this channel but you should not be married to the idea that you always have to play on the tips of your fingers now this is true for anything you're playing but it's especially true when you're playing double stops i distinctly remember learning to play fingered octaves and i hadn't quite figured out this idea that i didn't always have to play on the tips of my fingers right and i also didn't have to squeeze twice as hard which is makes learning to play finger doctors much more difficult if you instead relax the hand a little bit place the fingers much more on the softer part of the fingers then you can kind of allow for the fingers to move out of each other's way when necessary so [Music] okay it becomes a much more easy and also relaxed and you're going to be less likely to injure yourself when practicing fingered octaves and you're going to probably be more in tune this also goes into as i demonstrated earlier with awkward thirds though your hand being super tight and stretched isn't going to be quite the same problem with that but you'll be able to play a lot more relaxed if you allow yourself to play let's say the fourth finger more on this part of the finger rather than here see if i insisted on playing right on the tip of my finger like that my hand is a lot more claw like but if i am able to play more on this part of the fingers you can see right there rather than right here and am i able to just barely skirt by the d string on this case oh sorry the a string fourth fingers on the d string okay i'm being able to get as close to the a string as possible without actually touching it then my hand can stay a lot looser [Music] okay while playing thirds passages rather than if i insisted on playing everything on the tips of my fingers now the fifth and final rule for double stops and this is related to what i was just talking about with how i use my fourth finger and thirds is you want to maintain as natural a shape to the hand as possible if you want to have a very loose hand while playing the more you can get your hand shape to be as it would if you just let the fingers fall like this rather than anything else that turns the hand into a kind of a claw like this the better you're going to be and this goes back to what i talked about earlier with finger flexibility how do i keep no matter what double stop i'm doing this general shape to the hand now doing this properly is going to involve a lot of what i talked about earlier with finger independence going this way but whatever you do it's good to start out with the sense of the fingers falling this way and then try to apply it to whatever double stop you're doing as much as you possibly can so for instance the best place to start would be with octaves now very often i see people when they start to practice octaves they start with this very pinched kind of approach to both the first and the fourth fingers with the two middle fingers being curled in like this this is a terrible way to approach octaves and many of you are probably trying to play your octave passages like so the best way is again to take the hand find the most natural approach okay so the fingers take this position more or less okay [Music] tune it a bit maybe let these fingers in the middle stay the same shape but of course lift them out of the way but only enough not like this only enough to where they get out of the way of the other strings and then essentially your entire hand moves as a much looser unit [Music] whenever you're playing octave scales or passages the same thing of course applies to thirds if i take this okay i'm going to take my fourth finger put it here second finger move it here that's all has to move or third finger here first finger over here and generally i'm keeping roughly the same shape i'm just shifting some fingers around instead of trying to find each finger like this and even for things like tenths or fingered octaves you can still make the same approach okay so for fingered octaves we talked about earlier let the fingers fall like so here's the first finger third finger fourth finger second finger as i said before we're not trying to claw the hand i can still try to make as much this feeling to the hand as possible when i play and then for tents it's basically just an extension of that same feeling that you would have when playing the octave so the hand falls like this find your first finger hand falls like this except let it fall up here [Music] okay instead of really trying to squeeze that in see how the other fingers kind of come in a little bit like that so [Music] these fingers are actually very loose just here okay so you're able to maintain that essentially same shape of the hand as you did in the octave it's just extended a little bit like this in any case these have been my five rules for practicing double stops and i find double stops to be one of the most charming but also challenging aspects of learning to play the violin but if you learn how to think about things properly then it doesn't have to be as difficult as you previously thought and i'm all for making things easier so long as it makes things more excellent because as i often say there is no pleasure in mediocrity i've been to biomurphy for murphy music academy happy practicing and i'll see you next time

Channel: Murphy Music Academy

Views: 9,923

Keywords: twoset violin, violin, viola, cello, ling ling, practice, Julia Bushkova, hand, grip, hold, violin tenths, russian, best way, best, conservatory, texas, help, guide, arm weight, double stops, fingering, thirds, intonation, ysaye, bow hold, learn, university, violin techniques, violin advice, professor, abrsm, mozart, soloist, auditions, perform, concert, tutorial, education, lesson, tobiah murphy, murphy music academy, Daniel Kurganov, scales, lecture, Bruch Violin Concerto, mozart concerto, left hand

Id: PDSLNbWw9kA

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 24 2022