Cello After Two Weeks

sky — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 22:46:39 +0000

Movin’ right along here. Took my third lesson, end of the second week of learning to play cello. (It’s gotta be a real pain in the neck for my teacher to listen to my attempts.) Maybe he hears the same kind of scratchy tones from the 6-year-old students. But I’m enjoying moving along and have now built up two full weeks of practice behind me. If this were a meditation practice, we’d hardly expect much of a change at this point. But…

I’m hearing some improvement. Particularly learning where the notes are on the fingerboard. And learning to press all those fingers down and keep them down. Learning legato playing. Able to get the bow positioned better, but not perfect yet.

The most important thing from my third lesson was learning that I really have to press that bow against the strings as if I meant it. This gives a much better tone. (I keep forgetting.) Much better tone. And you’ll see those little silver strips across the fingerboard up near my hand — they’re there to remind me exactly where to put the fingers down to get the right pitches. (And there’s a little felt piece on the back of the cello neck where my thumb has to go.) It’s easy to forget, but when I do remember, I can actually sometimes his the right note the first time.

Ummm, did I say that the reason I’m learning cello is to understand what the string players have to do in order to play my compositions? Gaining empathy for sure.

The post Cello After Two Weeks appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Cello After One Week

sky — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 21:06:09 +0000

The previous article and video documented my first attempts to use a bow on the cello. Now, a full week later and after taking a couple of lessons, I’m playing a C major scale, some exercise, and doing some fiddling around. As a keyboard player, I find a few things to be challenging.

One is this idea that I have to change hand position to a new string to play more notes. I’m used to being able to slide my hands left or right on the keyboard with the notes just kind of laid out one after another. The idea that they might be side-by-side — more like “overlapping” — is challenging. Not phased too much by having to do different things with left hand and right hand — that’s something we also learn in piano 101. Though I’ve never played a guitar, I can imagine that it would be way easier to “hit the right note” if there were frets on the fingerboard. The cello is truly a challenge in terms of intonation. There’s nothing telling me in advance I’m going to put my fingers in exactly the right spot to hit that desired note. I hear it “after” I make my selection of position. Yikes!

I made a short recording improvising on the cello, in Logic Pro (think GarageBand) and then threw it away. I’ll document that kind of thing later on. It was truly terrible.

The post Cello After One Week appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Cello Archives - Sky's Blog

Cello After Two Weeks

Cello After One Week