How Karen Tuttle's "plop" transformed my left hand.

hi my name is Travis Merrill and I teach Viola at San Diego State University today I want to talk to you about an important left-hand concept that really transformed my playing the last few years when I got out of college I was really sort of frustrated with my left hand I felt like it was slow I felt like I got really tight when I had to play Fast passage work I felt like my vibrato was also kind of slow and very inconsistently applied and I tried a bunch of different exercises from lots of different books and from videos and I felt like my left hand was getting a little bit better each aspect was getting a little better and improving but overall it felt like I had a bit of a Frankenstein left hand it felt like I had all these different parts and different ideas that didn't really work together as a unit and it wasn't until I got the Karen Tuttle Legacy book which examines Karen tuttle's teaching through the lens of six of her students that I really struck upon an idea that clicked with me for the left hand and that idea is called the plop now since I'd studied with three of the teachers in that book and also Karen Tuttle herself briefly you would think that this would be an idea that I was really familiar with and that I had ingrained in my playing but when it was first introduced to me I didn't understand it quite as well as I did after reading the book and also I think I just didn't care enough to try and integrate it into my playing really well so what I want to do is walk you through some exercises and some Concepts to introduce this idea of the plop and I think you'll find that it's a really amazing way to integrate these ideas of finger action of balance and of release of tension along with a couple other bonuses let's get started so what is the plop the plop is Karen tuttle's term for the action of the finger dropping down onto the string and that has to happen with a very springy and quick action because if it doesn't and we don't stop the string quickly or release the string quickly then the note will always have a slight delay to the sound and that's what I was hearing in my own playing when I thought I heard that it sounded muddy so stopping the string quickly releasing the Queen the string quickly are really important now to get started with this we're going to try a exercise I learned from Kim keshkashian we're going to make some fists we're going to open and close our hand really quickly and we're going to take note of a few things one we'll note that this is a really good warm-up exercise for our hands so if you're cold this is a great way to get it warm but the other is we're going to notice that our fingers are springing up and down from these base knuckles in our hand now those are easy to see on this side of our hand but on this side of their our hand they're not quite in the same place they're not like right where you can see calluses on my hand they're right below where my hand is folding over my finger so to feel how our fingers are springing up and down from those base Knuckles that's going to give us a really springy and powerful and quick energy in the hand that's going to feel effortless when you get used to it so we're going to make some fists and other things we'll notice are that I'm not making a fist that Springs up really widely my fingers are staying close to my palm and that's going to ensure that my fingers are also moving really quickly right the smaller distance they have to travel the quicker my fingers are going to be other things to notice are that I'm not making a fighting fist right my thumb is relaxed this is a pacifist so in our pacifists and yes I will continue to refer to it as the pacifist so apologies for that in our pacifist we want our thumb to be relaxed and we want to notice that we can put our fingers down with a lot of energy without counter pressure from the thumb it's a really common problem when playing to squeeze with the thumb in order to put fingers down but that's actually not necessary if your fingers are springing down with this ploppy energy there's very little extra pressure needed from the thumb in order to stop the string so next try drumming the fingers on the body of the instrument you can try also doing the pacifist quickly on the body of the instrument you can try with single fingers you can try in rhythms so the next thing we're going to do is try a couple beginning plopping exercises with the instrument and playing position now in the Karen Tuttle way of thinking about the left hand we want to use the natural anatomy of our hand to the greatest extent possible what I mean by that is our hand has much more of an ability to reach back from the fourth finger than it does to stretch forward from the first finger you can immediately see the kind of tension of my hand when I stretch forward from the First Finger Versus expanding out and reaching back from my fourth finger to the first finger so to take advantage of that we're going to allow the hand to relax in a little bit towards the neck and depending on the size of your hand you may have to do this more or less smaller hands will end up being quite a bit closer to the neck larger hands will have less of this what I call Baby pancake this is the pancake wrist or Karen Tuttle also calls us the baby grip so I have baby pancake as my appropriation so we're going to make a little bit of a baby pancake the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to aim for the pads of my fingers so to do that when I'm plopping my fingers down and making my pacifist I'm going to aim for the center point between two strings so instead of just aiming for the D string with my first finger or the a string I'm going to aim right in between them as if some as if I'm playing fifths so I'll do that with each finger and then practice plopping and tapping really lightly additionally as mentioned before when we were doing these pacifist exercises making sure when I'm plopping and popping my fingers up and down that my thumb is really relaxed I don't have to squeeze my thumb to push the string down in fact there's very little pressure that's needed in order to get the strings down enough to vibrate fully a really important concept when thinking about the plop is that a balance and Karen Tuttle talks specifically about each finger having its own balance now if you think about things on the bow side when we play with the bow a lot of times we're going to feel that shift in balance from the pinky side of our hand to the first finger it's almost sort of a rolling motion exaggerating it here but when we're playing at the Frog to feel the bow balanced more on the pinky in the middle of the bow to feel it more balanced in the middle fingers and then at the tip to feel a little bit of balance more on the first finger in the same way when we're playing we want to be able to feel subtle shifts of balance from our first finger to our fourth finger it almost feels a little bit like a hand vibrato motion now this is something that you'll notice cellos and bass players doing all the time but because of the smaller intervals on the violin it's often unnecessary as long as you have a decent sized hand on the viola because our intervals are quite larger especially in first position that ability to rebalance the hand over the playing finger is really important now for our purposes that means that there's going to be a release of fingers after we play with it so I'm not holding fingers down the entire time that I'm playing now for those of you that have been told that you only have you know you have to keep the fingers down all the time I would encourage you to explore trying releasing fingers and the idea is that you're trading off a little bit of that physical security of having a finger down and knowing where the finger just was for flexibility and for a release of tension that are going to let the finger feel free to play and free to vibrate the other thing that's helpful to notice about this practice is that if you're really feeling that sensation of the pacifist you'll notice the fingers are staying really close to the string they're not popping way up after they're done playing and what that means is that even though I'm not leaving fingers down since I'm keeping them so close to the string my fingers can move really quickly and I'm not losing very much by not keeping them down to practice the plop we're going to try an exercise called plop and slur and this is to feel the subtle changes in balance between two fingers so I'm just going to go back and forth between Pairs of fingers I'll start on the D string between one and two [Music] so I'm putting a little Grace note a really fast note in between the E and the F sharp and the idea is that's encouraging my finger to go to go down really quickly and to lift really quickly which is going to help my finger action the speed of my finger action So the faster you do that Grace note the faster your finger action will become [Music] and it's helpful to think not only of the finger plopping down very quickly but to also think of it popping up in that same way that when you're making your pacifist they're popping up so I like to think of plopping and popping foreign three and four [Music] one and three one and four two and four now in some cases I was lifting the finger that had just played in other cases I wasn't since I do have a larger hand It's relatively easy for me to keep fingers down in a lot of cases but it's not necessary so experiment with that and next we'll be moving on to this idea of release in the plop so the final thing we're going to talk about with the plop is the ability to release tension now playing with the least amount of tension possible really helps our left hand to move faster and the plop has a great solution for integrating this release of tension so that it's something that you're feeling every time a finger goes down rather than always having to remind yourself release release release so to practice this we're going to do an exercise called Bounce fingers and all I'm going to do is plop my finger down and then immediately release to harmonic pressure so for the first note which I'll be playing on the D string Under the note E you won't hear much of a harmonic but for the other ones you'll hear a harmonic [Music] [Applause] now what does this do on the one hand it trains our fingers to plop down with energy and immediately release that energy but to do so really close to the string again the closer to the string the fingers are releasing the faster they're going to be when we have to do passage work so that's really helpful but what if we don't just want to release tension when we play what if we actually want to harness the energy of the plop this is where I think the plop really makes things helpful and so easy when it comes to vibrato so if you think about the springy energy required to put down the finger when you're plopping that fast action that fast tappy springy action ploppy action is a very similar feeling in a very similar motion to that of vibrato so you can practice this simply by doing really fast tapping and then continue that as vibrato if your finger is balanced and relaxed in terms of feeling like this joint is loose and your other joints in your hand and your arm are loose then you can use that energy and turn it into the start of a vibrato so the exercise we're going to try next is when I came up with I call plop and Sizzle so we're going to feel that sizzly energy of the fingertip on the string going between two notes in the plot [Music] I [Music] am what I love about that is then I don't have to think vibrate vibrate vibrate the plopping of my finger initiates the vibrato now a couple things need to be set up in order for that to work well if you don't place the finger with a lot of energy in the initial plop then what will happen is you won't get a plop and Sizzle you'll get what one of my students has termed plop and fizzle so in order to keep that Sizzle that effervescent feeling in the fingertip you have to put the finger down with quite a bit of energy but you immediately release that energy it's like throwing a stone into the water and then the vibrato or the waves that are coming out from that initial plop of the rock into the water so can try this with other fingers too ah [Music] foreign or if you're playing in a passage you can practice plopping in between notes to really feel the connection of the vibrato the rebalance of the hand and the release of tension for each note that you're playing [Music] ah [Music] so I hope you can see how useful this idea of the plop is for seamlessly integrating the ideas of finger action balance and release of tension and if you haven't already I would strongly encourage you to check out the Karen Tuttle Legacy book which is fantastic and if you enjoyed this video please like or subscribe to my channel I also have a lot more information on my teaching and ideas related to teaching at my website thanks for watching

Channel: Travis Maril

Views: 14,368

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Id: L3gTq5o9nTw

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023