Very good videos, but the part I'm struggling with is stopping the bouncing. Say you're at the end of an improvised song, and you want to use spiccato to 'walk' up the scale to a high root note, and then finish there on a long sustained note. I am finding it difficult to stop the bouncing completely and it will have those last few bounces (like you described bouncing a ball, when you stop dribbling, it will bounce 3 or 4 times before stopping) at the start of the note, making it sound shaky and weak before it stabilises into normal bow contact. Any advice for suddenly taking away that bouncing energy after a short series of spiccato notes?
Practice quickly landing your bow after bouncing by applying a small (just enough) amount of pressure on the index finger. Once you get better at having your bow set on the string after bouncing, try adding the notes back in. This also depends on what part of the bow you're in. The close to the tip the harder it is to stop the bounce so adjust the pressure necessary to stop.
@@undergroundvirtuosos1873 Thanks for the reply. So I need to try to stop the bow dead against the string without trying to sound the final note with horizontal motion of the bow? Sounds like a good way to simplify it by isolating the action of stopping the bounce. Thankyou, I'll give it a try.
@@undergroundvirtuosos1873So far I've found I get the closest to a good sound by using the bow around 1/3 up from the frog, but now I will practice this stopping action by itself in different places. As you can probably guess, I'm self taught, so I appreciate you taking the time to help me get better.
I've spent a bit of time practicing this now and I found that the unstoppable bouncing issue was more pronounced when pushing/pulling against the weight of the bow, for example trying to stop the spiccato on an upbow on the A or particularly the E string, or on a downbow on the G. I have mostly got past it now, and I found a good exercise to follow up, once I felt comfortable with Underground Virtuoso's suggestion above, is playing in 6/8, in this pattern: spiccato downbow, spiccato upbow, normal downbow - spiccato upbow, spiccato downbow, normal upbow That way you practice alternating between spiccato and normal bowing, with the change falling on both an upbow and a downbow, and it loops nicely so you can keep playing it until the sound is consistent. Playing this on each of the open strings has got me more used to differences in technique required to pull this off on the different strings. Thanks again for the advice.
Very good videos, but the part I'm struggling with is stopping the bouncing. Say you're at the end of an improvised song, and you want to use spiccato to 'walk' up the scale to a high root note, and then finish there on a long sustained note. I am finding it difficult to stop the bouncing completely and it will have those last few bounces (like you described bouncing a ball, when you stop dribbling, it will bounce 3 or 4 times before stopping) at the start of the note, making it sound shaky and weak before it stabilises into normal bow contact. Any advice for suddenly taking away that bouncing energy after a short series of spiccato notes?
Practice quickly landing your bow after bouncing by applying a small (just enough) amount of pressure on the index finger. Once you get better at having your bow set on the string after bouncing, try adding the notes back in. This also depends on what part of the bow you're in. The close to the tip the harder it is to stop the bounce so adjust the pressure necessary to stop.
@@undergroundvirtuosos1873 Thanks for the reply. So I need to try to stop the bow dead against the string without trying to sound the final note with horizontal motion of the bow? Sounds like a good way to simplify it by isolating the action of stopping the bounce. Thankyou, I'll give it a try.
@@undergroundvirtuosos1873So far I've found I get the closest to a good sound by using the bow around 1/3 up from the frog, but now I will practice this stopping action by itself in different places. As you can probably guess, I'm self taught, so I appreciate you taking the time to help me get better.
I've spent a bit of time practicing this now and I found that the unstoppable bouncing issue was more pronounced when pushing/pulling against the weight of the bow, for example trying to stop the spiccato on an upbow on the A or particularly the E string, or on a downbow on the G. I have mostly got past it now, and I found a good exercise to follow up, once I felt comfortable with Underground Virtuoso's suggestion above, is playing in 6/8, in this pattern: spiccato downbow, spiccato upbow, normal downbow - spiccato upbow, spiccato downbow, normal upbow
That way you practice alternating between spiccato and normal bowing, with the change falling on both an upbow and a downbow, and it loops nicely so you can keep playing it until the sound is consistent.
Playing this on each of the open strings has got me more used to differences in technique required to pull this off on the different strings. Thanks again for the advice.