If you watched America’s Got Talent this week you saw the amazing (and I don’t use the word lightly) Mandy Harvey. She is deaf and wowed the audience with her vocals and uke playing. I truly have no idea of how she does it, because as my teacher often reminds me, my best tool in the box isn’t in the music or my practicing or my bow. It’s my ears. I spend lots of time with my left hand, my right hand, looking at music, marking up music, but not enough time actually listening to my music. When your eyes are focused on the music and your brain and muscle memory are working to play the notes, you don’t have much brain space left for listening. I’ve read that up to 60% of your brain is used for vision. Throw in another 20-30% for your brain helping your left and right hands, at least 5% for your brain wandering thinking about what you have to do tomorrow and you’ll find you don’t have much brain space left for listening. Yet how can you improve your sound if you aren’t listening to yourself play? You aren’t going to like the answer, but one way is to record your playing. When you first record, you will close your eyes and groan and vow to take piano lessons instead. But you need to get past that. It helps to have an excellent recording device, one that will reflect your true sound. (I know, ugh, but isn’t that what you want to hear?) I use an H2 Handy Recorder by Zoom. I’m sure there are many others out there. I suggest recording a short phrase. When you listen, determine what you like about your sound and what doesn’t sound the way you want it to sound. This is the key. Maybe your intonation was off. Pinpoint the note(s) and make the correction. Maybe you were hitting the last note of the phrase with a bang when you needed to taper the sound. If you listen carefully, you will hear your sound and you will be able to try different things to change the sound to what YOU like. And if you can’t determine “how” to get the sound you want, at least you will know what it is you do want to hear. I think that is a huge step.
Practice. The word makes me think of when I was a kid and taking piano lessons and that word would make me cringe. It’s so much easier now. I’m a grown up (?) and have the choice of how to allocate my time. After my lesson, I’m pumped up with motivation to work on that section that I can’t seem to master, or listen to how the pros play a certain piece. But sometimes I’m feeling lazy/tired/unmotivated. So I’ll do something else- read, make a call, check email. It doesn’t take long before I’m thinking about my cello. I’m thinking about the music I’m working on. I start to think about how to practice that run I’m working on. Play it slowly. Play it with different rhythms. Play it in small chunks and slowly add them together. It doesn’t take long before I’m pulling my cello out of the case and tuning. I can’t seem to stay away. Not everyone gets this call. It helps to have a plan. If you’re feeling unmotivated and your cello isn’t calling for you, pull out an old piece of music to play. Sometimes that gets you going. Or call a friend and make a play date. Nothing like knowing you have to “perform” to get you moving. But don’t let your cello sit idly. The more you play the better you and your cello will sound. Remember why you’re doing this and do it!
Do you get bored by playing solo? Do you wish you had an orchestra, or a piano, or another cello to play along with you? I find that by practicing with the orchestra in my practice room definitely helps me in the actual rehearsals. The problem is that all the recordings (via YouTube) are at tempo, which is faster than my fingers go, especially during the early practice days. Here’s how to do it. You’ll need an app called “Amazing Slow Downer”. This app allows you to take a recording and slow it down to a tempo you can actually play. It’s not terribly expensive ($14.99), but don’t bother with the free version as it doesn’t let you use much of your recording. You also need to use “listentoyoutube.com”. This will convert any YouTube video to an mp3 audio and it’s free. Here’s the process. Find a version of something you want to play on YouTube. I try to use videos that don’t have initial chatter, but go right into the music. Listentoyoutube will walk you through the very easy conversion process. After you have converted the video, you can import it into “Amazing Slow Downer” and you’re ready to play with anyone from Yo Yo Ma to the New York Philharmonic. Or anything in between. I like to use ASD on my iPad so I can connect it to a bluetooth speaker and amplify the sound. I convert the YouTube on my desktop, then connect the iPad to the desktop to download the mp3. (It goes through iTunes so it is pretty simple.) From there I import the mp3 to ASD (again, it’s just a push of a button) and I’m rockin’ it with Yo Yo! Let me know if this works for you.
I got an email yesterday that had a cello video in it. Of course, I watched it. Sometimes I just watch a bit. This one I watched three times. If this doesn’t make you remember why you wanted to play the cello and motivate you to go practice … Enjoy.
My son, the hard working violinist, used to practice every day in the kitchen. I would ask about the other violins in his orchestra, about how they practiced. His response was something I never forgot. He said that they just “get” the music faster than he did, that he had to spend more time practicing. OK, this made sense, sort of. I think I get it now. For the past 4 months I’ve been working on an etude that is full of double stops. I’m practicing in small sections. Good so far. I was working on one section yesterday when I realized the “F” I was playing wasn’t an “F” at all. (Talk about slow learners.) I put on my “F” drone and worked the section again. And again and again. I was so happy that I finally got it. I thought about this, why it took me so long to realize that I was playing a wrong note, which just made the next few chords wrong as well. It has to do with listening. It seems to me that I spend so much energy looking at the music and thinking about my left hand that I don’t have much left for listening. So today when I work on this section again, I’m going to close my eyes and listen for that “F”, as well as the other notes. It’s only about 4 measures, so after working on it for months I probably don’t have to look at the music. Closing your eyes opens up your ears. I think it’s a fact and I’ll just keep trying.
Am I the only one who has a bow with a mind of its own? My bow does whatever it wants. Unless I give it some attention. I think that as adult beginners we focus so much on the left hand that we just let the bow go on its merry way. After all, we do need to play the right notes and the left hand has that job. What it has taken me many years to learn is that the music comes from the right hand. Yes, it does. Don’t bow, just use your left hand and how lovely is that sound? Oh, right. What sound? There is no sound without the strings in motion and that is the job of the bow. I think that’s why my teacher stresses playing open strings with the bow as a warm up every day. It makes it more interesting to play on different parts of the string (i.e., near the fingerboard, then near the bridge), using more or less arm weight, and varying the speed. After all, these are some of the factors that change the sound. You need to do this to experiment with your bow to see and hear the various sounds that your bow makes. Have you read “Rosindust” by Cornelia Watkins? Great book for cellists. She talks about “developing a palette of sounds” using various bowing techniques. So forget the notes for a while and actually listen to the different sounds your bow can create. By practicing these techniques they will incorporate themselves into your music. Don’t forget to listen and pay attention to the different sounds and moods that you can create.
I got diverted when I started talking about all the things we have to do to make music with the cello. I watch others and I think, it seems so easy to them. Why do I have to think about and remember so many things? Actually, I don’t and neither do you. We practice each part of celloing: the notes, the dynamics, the articulation, the bowing- in order to train our arms, hands, and fingers to do the work WITHOUT our brains having to remember everything. It would be impossible without the muscles “remembering”. There is so much to the music. The training comes a little at a time. I do write all over my music but I think that the act of writing it down reinforces what I’m trying to train my fingers to do. And believe me, my fingers have a mind of their own. If I don’t train them properly, they’ll do whatever they want. Training them involves slow smooth motions, or they won’t get it. (My fingers are slow learners.) That’s what the practicing is all about. Training your fingers (and yes, your bow) to do what your brain knows you have to do. Your fingers don’t get the message from the brain. They have to do the work, make the motions, over and over, to learn. This is what you’re practicing. It’s not rocket science, but it is complicated.
Playing the cello is very complicated. There are SO many things to think about, do, and remember. Ah, there’s the tricky one. How much can we possibly remember? How to move the bow (a topic for later), dynamics, articulation, and of course, hitting the actual notes. This is where most of my focus is, and I’m guessing I’m not alone. So it makes sense to do things one at a time, not trying to do it all at once from the get-go, but layering on each different idea. Some would argue that this is a waste of time and you are learning wrong things that you’ll just have to relearn. I come from a position that I always start by playing loud, slow and smooth. My first priority is to learn the notes. But I’ve learned that it isn’t to my advantage to learn all the notes and then think about the bow. Neglect the bow for too long and you will find you’ve created an enemy instead of a friend. So what I’ll do is pizz a few measures (left hand work on the actual notes), then bow the same measures without the left hand. (Yes, relax your left arm!) If you’ve never done “bow only” work, it’s harder than it seems. But your bow will appreciate the attention and reward you with smooth, easy string changes. You’ll find out when you put both hands back in motion. Try it. Let me know what you think.
I have an amazing teacher. You can see for yourself at nancello.com. She encourages me beyond my abilities and makes me believe I can do anything. So I continue to try everything. I’m playing in a community orchestra and a new cellist joined me. She is young and started playing cello as a child. Needless to say, she is an excellent cellist. She didn’t have any music so she was reading off mine. I had to explain it to her, as it is full of markings. Numbers, shift markings, colors, notated repeat info. At the next rehearsal she had her own music with nary a mark. I admit, most people do not make as many marks as I do, but as a late learner, I need more help. It’s not obvious to me when to shift and I have a hard time looking ahead. Bad eyes or just less practice, or a combination. But since I’m doing this for my pleasure it makes sense to me to do whatever it takes for me to do the best I can do. So I encourage you to do the same. Mark up your music if it makes it easier for you. Use colors and special marks that you understand. I did notice that my new cellist stand partner was quickly marking the repeats on the music, just before we played. So maybe all my ideas weren’t so bad.
It’s possible. I make lots of wrong assumptions. Starting with thinking playing the cello (or guitar) was going to be easy. I guess I’m a left brained kind of girl. some things were easy. Math and English were always easy for me. I couldn’t draw but I aced algebra. So it’s not surprising that I keep thinking playing the cello is so hard. It IS hard for me. Creativity is not in my wheelhouse. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be a wonderful hobby/pastime/new career. I just watched an orchestra concert of students from third through eighth grades. They weren’t “amazing”, but it was so very enjoyable to watch these students (who had obviously worked very hard) perform and take pleasure in the music they were creating. They were playing “I’ve Got Rhythm” and one violinist in the very back of the group was smiling and swaying to the music. It was beautiful. There is something very joyful about making music in a group. I feel it without exception in rehearsals as well as concerts. So ignore the mistakes and draw inspiration from the kids. It’s not easy for them either. It’s so easy to forget that everyone starts out as a beginner. Our teachers and performers have often spent twenty years studying and practicing. We’re all on this journey, climbing the music mountain. It’s not easy, but it sure is a great adventure.