check out all of Andy’s podcast episodes here
transcribed by Darlene Marshall
Contrabass Conversations
9/21/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
Part 1: Beginning Steps
Hi, my name’s Andy Anderson, and I’m going to be showing today a few of the techniques I use to teach students some of the basics of bass playing. I’m hoping I might be able to put ideas out there that might help teachers when they’ve exhausted their own repertoire of tricks to get people to do the right technique, and this is a way we can share our own ideas on how to teach.
One of the first places to start, of course, is holding the bass. I prefer standing, some people sit. In general, I try to have the nut of the bass, which is this part right here, somewhere between my eyebrows and my hairline. That’s a general idea of how the height should be. The position of the bass, some people playing sitting like to sit behind the instrument, or having it like a 45-degree with the body; or I’ve even seen some people, and this is the way I started, being able to hold it without my hands and just balance it on your gut, kind of perpendicular to your body. If you’re going to play standing, I recommend a kind of a left-handed fencing pose, where if you can imagine holding a sword in your left hand, your left foot’s going to be slightly forward, kind of an athletic stance, and hopefully you can incorporate your left knee against the bottom of your instrument to kind of manage the turning-out of the face of the instrument.
Once your student’s able to hold the bass comfortably, preferably without either hand kind of grabbing it to make sure it doesn’t fall over, you need to make sure that both hands can reach all the way down the fingerboard, preferably pretty close to the bridge. Sometimes if you’re going to go down with both hands, like moving to the end of the fingerboard, you’re going to want to take your left leg and step back. It’ll look something like this [demonstrates], so you can set the bass kind of on your shoulder up here, and that way you can really reach down and grab all the way to the end of the fingerboard.
Once your student is able to comfortably move their hand up and down the fingerboard without the bass being clunky or feeling like it’s going to fall out of their hand, then you’re generally going to have to put the left hand of the bass on the bass. I do that by kind of pretending I’m holding a can of soda or something like that, and basically the same way my fingers are going to be curved for holding that, or a glass of water, I’m going to try to have all the fingers curve the same way and just put it on the bass.
One of the basic principles I use of holding the instrument like this is that all of your joints and moving parts should be somewhere in the middle of their range of motion; you want to avoid the extremes. You want to avoid having your fingers all the way extended, or having them all the way curved, or bent backwards as one of the worst things. There are occasions where you’re going to break those rules, but as your standard, default holding position – the way you hold the bow, the way you hold the left hand, the way you hold your back and your legs – everything should be in a nice round comfortable position.
I originally wasn’t taught this way; I came to it over many years of study, and I kind of keep both my hands as if I’m wearing mittens. The back three fingers are going to be pretty close together on each hand, and the first finger and the thumb are going to be kind of independent. And what it looks like on the left hand, and the reason it looks like that, is because down here, generally we don’t use our third finger. And so what I’m trying to accomplish is that I’m going to have an equal length of string between each finger [demonstrates]. And it will gradually get smaller as you go down. But what you want to avoid, is this kind of basic – where you have these two fingers [two and three] centered between the two outer fingers. Because if I take the third away, you’ll notice this space is bigger than that one. And that’s a common problem, and so to compensate for that I just make sure I tell the student “Make sure there’s an equal length of string between the fingers you are using”.
Sometimes I’ll have a student who has a particularly difficult time getting the hand to be comfortable in this type of a position, with everything rounded and equal spacing; and inevitably, when they go to their first finger, all the fingers will come back to help. And at first, I like to – if they are having a lot of difficulty with it, I do what my father did to me! Which was, he rubber-banded my middle two fingers together like this [demonstrates], and then he would also kind of attach my pinky finger like this [demonstrates]. And then that kind of forced me to keep this shape. One of the other ways, if you don’t want to use the rubber band — there’s a lot of reasons not to; a lot of times your fingers turn purple after a few minutes, which can be a little disconcerting – is you can actually just take a Pop’s rosin container and put it like this, between the first and second fingers [demonstrates]. And it seems to work just about right, and a lot of times it helps them to feel the amount of stretch, the openness of the first two fingers. And again, having a can or a glass or some cylindrical object that you can put in someone’s hand, a lot of times forces them to feel not only that the fingers are curved and rounded, but also that the thumb is rounded as well.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
Contrabass Conversations
9/28/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
Part 2: Introducing the Bow
Now the next part of introducing a new student to the bass is – well, there’s some debate about this; whether or not it should just be played with pizzicato, playing open strings – which of course is pretty natural. I mean, my two-year old enjoys doing that; he’ll sit there and pluck it like a guitar; it’s fun. So anybody can kind of start with that, and I think it’s a good place to start; it’s a very quick way to start producing sound on the instrument. But eventually you want to be able to get the bow in the hand as soon as possible, I think, because it’s a difficult thing to learn and it’s basically the lifeblood of how we produce sound as a classical bass player, and it’s really the only way we can sustain a sound on the instrument.
So there’s a few different techniques I use try to get a person thinking the right way, before they even put the bow in their hand. And if someone’s already been holding the bow, a lot of times I have to break them of a lot of misconceptions, or the way they’re holding it – they hold it differently than any other object you would ever put in their hand. They hold it like this, with fingers extended, a lot of times it looks – it’s very hard to look at! So a lot of times what I’ll do, is I’ll hold the bow out in front of them like this and I’ll tell them to pretend it’s – I’ll hold it vertically like this [bow is actually held horizontally-DM] and I’ll tell them to pretend it’s a drawer and to pull it open. This causes the back half of their hand, from these knuckles toward their body here, to relax a bit, because when you pull open a drawer you don’t have everything rigid. You just let your arm hang, and you just use your body to pull the drawer open. And that’s one of the main ideas: that you’re pulling sound, and that you aren’t rigidly trying to hold it. You can see when I grip like this; you can see all my knuckles sticking out, they turn white, and it looks horribly uncomfortable. Unfortunately, a lot of students, when they first start holding the bow – this is what they wind up with.
Some of the ways we can get rid of that rigidness, of holding the bow very tightly – I had a teacher, Jane Day in Portland, Oregon; she lives in Gresham, that taught me, right when I was four. She had me do these little exercises. The easiest one is to hold the bow vertically like this, and with all your fingers curved, including your thumb, you walk your way up and down the stick [demonstrates], inching your way along. And you just kind of slide your thumb up, and you try to keep the bow as still as you can. And when you get to the top, you inch your way back down. And you can see I’m trying to keep the bow as stable as I can. And I’m trying not to lock any fingers or do anything bizarre at all. Now all this does, is it makes you hold the bow kind of loosely because you have to let go of it at some point, to slide one or another finger down. It also develops the independence of your fingers, while at the same time keeping all your fingers curved and loose.
Once you’ve done the vertical curling up and down the bow, you can turn the bow sideways and try doing it. This is considerably harder, because now you feel the weight of the frog changing as you move out to the tip. And this requires a great deal more concentration, but usually what I tell students is, during their TV time they can be walking up and down the bow like this, and it can actually produce a lot of dexterity that they didn’t have before.
Sometimes I find that if the drawer-pull idea doesn’t work, you can kind of put the bow up like this and tell them to pretend you’re pulling yourself up on a cliff. And that also gives the idea that you curve your fingers and you hold them firm, but not rigid like this, so everything can be relaxed and yet at the same time you activate certain muscles.
Now when I started on cello, I learned to have my thumb here, right where the ebony and the pernambuco meet. And I played like that up until college, actually. Then a colleague of mine – I should say, a fellow student – Dr. Anthony Stoops, suggested I should try playing with it back here, actually what I call “in the frog”. It’s not sliding in like this; it’s exactly like it is here [demonstrates]; it’s just you move it to this slightly wider part. And it should feel almost identical, you just move back here. And I like this position; this has now become basically my default position. There’s a third way to play, and this is only for rare instances, and that’s to put the thumb underneath. I like to have students becoming comfortable with all three right from the start. This is my default – either of these can be the default [demonstrates]; I think they’re the two most common. This definitely should not be the default [thumb underneath]. But sometimes it helps to get a student to lay back the back half of their hand here; so if they’re sticking these knuckles out, chances are, if you have them put their thumb underneath, this is going to flatten out. And by having it flat, it just gives you an extra suspension system.
One of the things I gained when I was at University of Michigan is, I took some string pedagogy courses with Robert Culver. And one of the things that he said that’s always kind of stuck in my head was that the right hand is a series of loose, flimsy springs. That’s an exact quote! I’m positive he won’t mind me borrowing it, because it’s tremendously effective in changing the way you think about the hand. It’s a series of suspension systems; you have the suspension system of the string itself, which is flexible; that gives you a little bit, and it acts like a spring; it rebounds when you pull it and release it. The hair itself acts like a spring; when you stretch it, it wants to come back here. So there’s your second spring. The stick acts like a spring; when you flex it, it wants to rebound again. So now you have three springs that are operating at the same time. And then you can add a fourth, if you think of your hand as a series of springs.
Because everything has a give to it. And if you hold your hand rigid, you won’t be able to feel these other three springs working as well. But also you will have neglected the fourth spring, which I think is the most important, and that’s the ability of your hand to be able to move while engaging the string.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
Contrabass Conversations
10/04/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
Part 3: Bow Hand concept
Now I’m going to take a minute to talk about the roles of the fingers on the bow and their placement. There’s no hard and fast rule about this; everyone’s hand is different, but there are some bow holds that really look lovely. They’re just awesome. And after looking at a few of those, they have some things in common. One is that they tend to be nice and curved; I’ve already talked about that, with all the fingers being gently curved, nothing ever sticking out like this or bent backward. The other is, most of them tend to have the middle finger roughly over the ferrule, which is this shiny part of silver right here. And if you have your thumb in the frontmost position where it actually touches the pernambuco, you might be a little farther, almost touching the hair maybe. If you have it back in the frog, you’re going to slide back a bit. In general, depending on the width of your hand, your pinky’s going to ride down the back side of the frog. I’ve had some people say that they think it should be on the eye, but I find that makes students kind of curve their pinky like this, thinking that that’s where it goes, but really, these fingers just kind of flop. Now, after you’ve got these fingers flopping kind of, you’re going to find that these middle two don’t have as much of a role to play as the outer ones do, in holding the bow when it’s in the middle of the air. Really, you can take these off and just hold it with your outer ones, and it should just feel kind of like you were breaking a pencil, between your outer fingers and your thumb. And the force direction goes right through the middle of the stick; you aren’t rolling it one way or the other, you have all your fingers curved, and you just kind of set the bow on these wrinkles, that are the last knuckle wrinkle, on the underside of your fingers … You set the bow across that, and then you just have the thumb kind of gently push the bow into them. And then when you turn it over, it has a nice curved, rounded look. Sometimes you’ll see this muscle here flexing; that’s completely normal. That’s a muscle that’s OK to flex it.
Once you have these fingers flopping and the outer fingers kind of acting to hold the bow, using the thumb pushing between them, you can kind of get this symmetric nature of the two hands, where they kind of mirror each other. [holds bow with both hands]. Your first finger slightly forward on each hand, and you can actually imagine that you have equal spacing between these fingers [two, three and five], and between the same fingers on your other hand. It doesn’t have to be like that, but I find it’s more comfortable actually, if I think of the two hands kind of having kind of a similar position.
Now I need to talk about the role of the index finger and the thumb, and I use them as like a counter-lever, where the thumb acts against the index finger to move the bow. I can actually hold the bow against the string using just my thumb and my index finger. [demonstrates] The thumb is holding up the back side of the bow, and the index finger is holding the bow against the string. And you see I can completely freely wiggle the back half of my hand and still not drop the bow; in fact, I can even pull a nice sound just with those two fingers. It gets a little harder if you get too close to the frog like this. But just to get a feel for holding the bow, kind of playing with the flat hair, with just those two fingers … it lets you feel the way they should transfer the weight of your arm to the string.
Now, the muscles I use to hold the bow with just the thumb and the index finger like this are the same muscles I use to start every sound I make with the instrument; with the bow anyway. They’re what I use to transfer the weight of the arm to the string. And you can see it; I can actually flex the three different suspension systems that are in the bow and instrument: the string, the hair and the stick. You can see them all flexing [demonstrates]. And then I can actually load the string in either direction by pulling with my index finger, like as if I was plucking the string right here on the bow [demonstrates]; you can see I’ve got this kind of a pluck, and pluck in the opposite direction. When I do that, if you can see my index finger I’m actually plucking, and you can see the string moving, as if my finger was on the string… and that’s all plucking in a downbow direction. Now the weird thing about the bow is sometimes you have to pluck in the upbow direction! Which is just the opposite of what you normally would do if you were actually plucking the string.
OK, so we’ve talked about loading the string with just the thumb and index finger, and being able to cock it to either side, loading it with energy from either side with the plucking action of the first finger through the bow into the string. That’s one aspect of starting the note; the other aspect involves the rest of your arm. And there’s — depending on the type of sound I’m trying to produce, I will mentally be thinking about different parts of my arm. Generally, for a long note, I’m going to be thinking of the finger and the thumb to cock the string, I’m going to lay the weight of my upper arm, basically my whole arm, on top of it. Now the string is loaded pretty well, and then I’m just going to kind of release the string. It’s hard to explain exactly what I’m doing, but with my finger I’m actually kind of plucking slightly, and then I allow my arm to move at a steady speed [demonstrates]. And you can hear that at the beginning of that, there’s a nice pluck sound. Just straight to an immediate sound, with no delay.
The same exact thing applies to an upbow. You cock the string, thinking of your finger and your thumb, you kind of – through the stick, you feel the string – you feel the string flex. You can see it flex, if you look up close, and I’m getting a couple of little burps. The goal is, you don’t want to get any burps as you’re cocking the string. You should be able to flex all three suspension systems and pull the string – oops, there I let it go again – and pull the string to the side like this. And I’m using not just my index finger but my whole arm, on the upbow especially. But I am thinking of my first finger, to kind of cock it. And then, after I’ve cocked the string with my finger and my thumb, I lay the weight of my arm on it, then I think of that release again, the same way you think of releasing a pizzicato. And the trick to it is that after you’ve released it, you keep the bow moving at a nice steady speed so that the tone doesn’t change a lot. If you want a steady tone; of course, you can use that to make all sorts of variations in tone after you’ve started it.
The hardest part is getting the string to speak at the first instant, and I think that this relationship to the pizzicato helps, at least it’s helped me, to kind of clarify how to play clean.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
Contrabass Conversations
10/06/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
Part 4: Bow Placement, Speed and Weight
When I first was trained to play different bow directions, I remember being, you know, they slapped the big Simandl book down and my dad had me read through the first couple pages of whole notes going to half notes going to quarter notes. And it really wasn’t addressing some of the more subtle nuances, probably because I was just figuring out how not to drop the bow and things like that. But eventually – you start out with slow notes, and eventually you start chopping them into tinier pieces until finally you have very fast notes. And that’s really a very good way of thinking about it, because all a fast note is, is [demonstrates] a tiny cross-section of a long note.
Now that we’ve basically kind of figured out how to hold on to this stick with hair that we call a bow, we kind of have to experiment with the way the actual instrument responds when we put the hair on the string. And there are several variables that you have to take into account; one of them is the distance from the bridge. If you play right on top of the bridge [demonstrates] – they call it ponticello, which I think might even literally mean “on the bridge” – and it gets this distortion guitar type sound. So you have close to the bridge, that’s one variable. Then, the other two variables are the weight you’re applying to the string with your arm, and then the speed at which you’re going to pull the string in either direction. And those three are complimentary; if you change one, oftentimes if you want to maintain a similar sound you have to change the other two proportionately. And that’s a tricky thing; any time you add an extra variable you go from algebra to calculus all of a sudden and it becomes very complicated. So it’s going to kind of start experimenting with a single bow placement trying a given weight and a given speed: maybe cut both in half at the same placement from the bridge, and you’ll find that all of a sudden you’ve been able to change the volume considerably, but the tone more or less remains the same. If you want to change the tone a lot, I find a lot of times you can move the distance from the bridge, and farther from the bridge will get a more whispery tone – under-the-breath they call it, sotto voce, literally under the breath – this is a beautiful sound, and it can be used to great effect in solo playing and orchestral playing all the time. If you really want to send shivers up peoples’ spines, just lightly pull the bow and do it over the fingerboard. At the same time, you can go the opposite direction, and in general, to get a similar type of sound and a response, when you go closer to the bridge you’re going to have to cut your speed down; the bow speed will have to be much slower in order to not play a ponticello-type sound [demonstrates]. It’s also much harder to start the string. You can see how slow my bow is moving. Now if I wanted that to be a more aggressive sound, more obnoxious, I could simply add a lot more weight. You can see me flattening out the ribbon of hair onto the string right there [demonstrates]. And you can see how that gets a very harsh sound. If I don’t put as much weight on it, then I can get a ponticello sound.
Sometimes when you’re playing different music, it will require you to change the length of your string by moving up to a much higher note on the bass, and in essence what you did is just made your string much shorter. In general, if you want to maintain a similar sound, the distance from the bridge has to remain the same in relationship to the length of string. So as the string gets shorter, your right hand, the bow placement, is going to have to be at the same proportion of the string. So let’s say my bow is at 1/10th of my whole string length. Well, as my string length shrinks, I want to keep it at 1/10th, which means it gets closer to the bridge.
Because of the phenomenon of — in order to maintain a similar tone with a given bow placement, when you’re going up — sometimes you have to go from a note that’s very high to a note that’s very low. And you want to keep the same tone. But you can’t keep exactly the same bow placement, because all of a sudden you’re jumping from a short string to a very long string. And this is why God invented these three different aspects to creating the sound on the bass! Because what you can do is, when you want to keep this sound up here [demonstrates], you can actually maintain the same bow placement, and by changing the weight and bow speed you can kind of hide the fact that you didn’t change your placement [demonstrates]. You see, I’m moving the bow much slower and I’m using very little weight, even though my bow placement is closer to the bridge than I would really want for that note.
In the same way that the length of the string affects the way you’re going to use your bow, and the placement from the bridge affects the way all these other things relate to each other, the thickness of the string also changes things. I find that on a thicker string, I tend to have to move my bow slower at a given distance from the bridge than I would, say, on this string [demonstrates]. And you can see the difference. On this string, to get the same tone I was moving a much faster bow. A lot of players just learn naturally to compensate for this; if they want to hold the note very long they move closer to the bridge and lighten up the weight and try to mask the fact that they’re closer to the bridge. And on the low string it’s nice because you don’t have to — it’s much harder to play right next to the bridge so you kind of learn to play farther, or with a slower bow speed.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
Contrabass Conversations
10/12/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
Part 5: Developing Smooth Bow Changes
Ok. So we’ve talked about holding the bow, we’ve talked about placement from the bridge. The first thing most people start with is long notes, and once you’re able to play them with a bit of space between them [demonstrates], you know – from one end of the bow to the other, stop, and go the other direction like that — then the next battle is figuring out how to connect them. And in my training, I’ve experienced many different ways of how to connect two notes… from my first teachers, who really didn’t talk too much about it, they just said make it smooth! Don’t put as big of a gap between them – a very kind of, you know – just do it type attitude. And you know, for the most part I could figure that out; I think it was just because I’d started out on cello when I was really young I was able, at least to some degree, to change directions smoothly. When I got to college I realized it wasn’t as smooth as I would like, and so I started thinking about it, and I believe Robert Culver, again, at Michigan was one of the people who discussed not changing everything at the same instant. So when you’re playing a note, when you get to the end of that note – I’m just going to stop right here [demonstrates] – right about here, I’m going to start moving my upper arm in the other direction, and it’s going to go kind of like snapping a towel or a whip, where one end of the whip changes and the rest – uh, half – changes and then finally the very tip of it changes. And that’s kind of how you want it. I’m going to exaggerate and see – it’s not going to sound great, because it really shouldn’t be exaggerated — [demonstrates] but this is kind of the idea: I change my upper arm, I change my elbow, and then I change my hand last. And that was overly exaggerated. In practice, it’s going to look something more like this [demonstrates]. And you can see how that was a nice smooth change. In general it’s easier to do a smooth change at the tip than at the frog. And this has caused many people, who have done a lot of thinking about it, to come up with different ways to deal with this more challenging area. Leonard Rose, a cellist, is a huge hero of the principal cellist at Lyric, Danny Morgenstern. And Danny, when I got into the opera, gave me a bunch of videos so I could look and learn about this hero of his. And one of the things I remember seeing in this video of Leonard Rose is that he suggested, for making a smooth bow change, at each end of it you’re going to take the bow and slightly change the angle of it with the string. You’re going to drop it at the tip [demonstrates] –and you’re going to reach, and then change [demonstrates], and then you’re going to do the same thing when you get to the frog. You’re going to reach [demonstrates] and change. And you make kind of a “frown”, if you will, with the shape of your bow. You’re going to draw a frown [demonstrates] – I’m exaggerating right now. But it’ll be slightly like this. That’s one of the ways that someone who thought a lot about it mentioned to do it. And it wasn’t all that foreign to me, because I had just come from North Texas, where I had studied with Jeff Bradetich for about nine months. And he didn’t do it at the tip, probably because that’s an easier place to do it. But he did do it at the frog; he called it “dip the tip”. And he would actually stick his hand over here, somewhere in space, at the tip of my bow, right about there – and he would make me, as I got to the frog, reach down and tap his palm [demonstrates]. As I got to the frog, reach down and tap the palm.
Now, I think that that is an effective way; as you can hear, it worked fairly well. And Jeff certainly makes an effective argument for it, and I think it should be one of our foundational ways for playing a smooth bow change. But I also think that we should also be able to do it without any change in the angle, practicing distributing the bow change through the arm [demonstrates]. Just one direction to another. And you notice I’m keeping my bow in one plane as I travel from one end to the other. And the way I’m doing it is I’m basically softening, so I’m not doing a jerky motion where my entire body changes direction at each end like a machine would; I soften it. I change one part of my arm at a time and gradually work it so that everything isn’t moving at the same instant.
One of the things I need to say is that when you’re trying to do a smooth bow change, you need to use a technique that’s going to help you to do it. Either with dipping the frog or the tip at each end, or by gradually distributing the bow change through your body. But you don’t want to be trying – to make that such a habit that when you’re trying to do notes that aren’t supposed to be connected, like for instance [demonstrates] – I see a lot of people who practice so much “dipping the tip” when they’re here, that when they go to do a fast stroke their upbow dips every time. And it looks like they’re – it looks funny! [demonstrates]. And so what I would say, is that when you’re – you need to able to know when to use the technique and when not to, to turn it on and off when it’s necessary. And make THAT a second-nature habit – when to use it and when not to.
Refining the Bow Hold
Occasionally I have a student who’s having a great deal of difficulty holding the French bow. Some of my colleagues, Greg Sarchet for instance, would probably suggest, “Well, just have them hold a German bow!” It will fix them all immediately! But I like the French bow; I like it a lot, and I’m better at teaching it, so I don’t give up quite yet. I’ll do basically the same thing I did with the left hand, which is – I’ll start out with a rubber band and I’ll even rubber-band the same fingers together, the back three fingers will be kind of made into a mitten like that, and it kind of forces the person to move these together as unit, and kind of flop them over the edge. And it forces them to think about the index finger as an independent unit. The same way you would if you were thinking of plucking with it. You wouldn’t do anything weird with the back half of your hand if you were just plucking. The same thing is true if you’re just holding the bow. So if that doesn’t work – I have a series of last resorts I use. One of them is, I will actually stick a cork or a rosin container – the first place I’ll stick it is here [in between middle and index fingers] if they’re having trouble keeping their index finger separated from their other fingers. And they look ridiculous when they’re having to do this. But I’ll have them hold it like this, which is an exaggeration of what I really want them to do. But as a general principal, I oftentimes find by swerving too far to one side of the road from what your tendency is, when you finally stop swerving, you go right down the middle of the road. Which is what you want. If that doesn’t work, and if they’re having trouble keeping their thumb bent, then I will stick another smaller rosin container here [in between thumb and side of index finger] – and at this point, the person looks at you like you’re nuts because – I mean, who plays like this? But I’m forcing their hand to be somewhat close to the position I want them to play in. And then I have them play like this for a week, and I tell them, “Every time you play your bass, you have to put these in”. And it’s humiliating, so it gives you a little bit of an incentive to learn quickly, so you can take out the rosin containers and stop looking like you’re using training wheels.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
Contrabass Conversations
10/15/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
Part 6: Developing Articulation in the Bow
Well, now we’ve discussed building our technique, holding the bass, you know – being able to put your left hand on the instrument, and basically how to hold the right hand. Back and forth a few notes – and then gradually, after you’re able to connect some nice long notes and you start to develop a certain amount of flexibility in the fingers of the right hand, then you’re ready to start doing separate notes and gradually shortening the notes that you’re doing. And I have a few ways of starting out increasing the speed. In general, going back and forth isn’t that hard. If you aren’t worrying about connecting, it’s just a series of notes in different directions that you’re starting and stopping the sound. This is important because a lot of people – when I first started playing, I just thought – I wasn’t thinking of the bow change, I’d just get to one end and then I’d go in the other direction. I didn’t think about it. In order for two notes next each other to sound clean and distinct, you actually have to stop the sound and go in the other direction. So this is the opposite of a smooth bow change; you want it to be completely stopped, and move in the other direction. The string actually has some inertia as it rolls in one direction. You actually have to stop that and move in the other direction. So a lot of times what I’ll do, is I’ll have a student just grab, cock the string, move a little ways, stop, grab and cock the string again in the opposite direction, and release it. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a student, when they get to one end of the bow, to completely stop, put the weight on the string, and actually bounce it a couple of times side to side like this, so you can actually see their string jiggling, and they’re cocking it in the direction they’re going to move. Cocked, and then they release [demonstrates]. And then stop, and they’re going to cock it in the other direction, under their hand. And you can do it with just your arm, which I’m doing right now; but you’ll see I can also do it with just my finger [demonstrates] … and then release.
Now in general, as you go faster you’re going to get smaller. That’s a general principal; I’ll probably mention it a couple of times. When I say smaller I really mean it, in every instance in the way your muscles are moving; everything just shrinks down and becomes more minute in its dimensions. And the reason for that is very simple; it takes longer to travel a mile than it does to travel a half-mile. If you cut the distance in half that you’re moving, it’ll go twice as quickly at a given speed. And since our speed is based on whatever speed we can get a beautiful sound at [demonstrates], that’s our speed. So if I want to go twice that fast, I’m only going to use half the bow [demonstrates]. And you can see it very plainly there. Now you can keep cutting it in half [demonstrates] until finally I’m doing a whole bunch of downbows, and they’re very quick. I’ve talked about shorter, faster notes just being a little cross-section, a little chunk of a longer beautiful-sounding note. Sometimes in order to reinforce that, I’ll have a student play a nice long downbow, and then I’ll have them play the same nice long downbow, but I’ll have them play it in little tiny chunks, like maybe eight chunks [demonstrates]. And the idea is that they’re going to use the same amount of bow, move the same distance, they’re just going to pulse it [demonstrates]. And I actually — they’re making tiny little circles as they go – stopping, grabbing, releasing; stopping, grabbing, releasing. All in the same direction, so they can feel that each one of these is a tiny cross-section of that long note. After we’re able to do the downbows, eight in one direction, then we just do exactly the same thing on an upbow [demonstrates]. And the goal should be that all these little chunks sound identical. They’re all pieces of that same beautiful long note, just a tiny little cross-section of it. After we’re able to move both in a downbow and in an upbow smoothly, then gradually what we should do is just start shaving off the number we’re moving in each direction. Like let’s cut it down to four [demonstrates]. Now there I’m using half the bow, because I’m only using half the number of notes; instead of eight I’m using four. So I’ll get out to about the middle of the bow, and then I come right back. And then eventually I can go down to three, two and finally one [demonstrates]. And you can hear that they all sound identical; that’s the goal. You want to be able to sound the same in any part of the bow, which we just did, and in any direction of the bow.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
Contrabass Conversations
10/18/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
The next step I usually make in bow technique is a little tricky, because a lot of times it’s very personalized to the technical problems I see in front of me on the student. Some students will do this next thing very easily and some have a lot of difficulty with it and it doesn’t come naturally at all. A lot of it has to do with equipment. And the next thing I’m talking about is, we’re able to go back and forth now; the next thing is being able to go back and forth and leave the string between each stroke. And that — off-the-string strokes are very tricky; there’s a lot of misconceptions about them, and since I don’t have a student sitting in front of me here it’s very difficult for me to know exactly how to proceed. But bearing that in mind, I’ll just kind of throw out some of the techniques I use to deal with introducing someone to the idea of this bouncing the bow. There are a whole bunch of different ways of introducing how to bounce the bow. As many as you can think of, probably. One of the ways I was first taught is that it’s simply a reaction to throwing the bow down, and the bow will just give you a bounce in the opposite direction. [demonstrates] Like that. So you have down-up, down-up, down-up, down-up. And then eventually you speed that up until you have a [demonstrates: down-up-down-up-down-up]. And that is actually the way I was originally taught. That, combined with the idea that if you do an on-the-string stroke very quickly [demonstrates], eventually as a result of all these loads and release of the string, all these springs reacting at the same time, those springs naturally want to kick you out. And so eventually, as you go fast enough it will start to bounce. My first teacher, Dr. Larry Zagonce (spelling? –DM), that is basically the way he taught me; he combined those two ideas with another one, which is that, on your down-bow stroke, you’re going to be close to your top string. On your up-bow stroke, you’re going to be closer to the string below it. So he actually taught me to think of it like this [demonstrates] where on the downbow I’m closer to the G, on the upbow I’m closer to the A. And he actually would have me play a double-stop. And eventually this rotation of the bow helps to kick the bow out. Because you’re loading it and changing direction, and each time you load it and change it, it kicks you back out. That’s kind of a from-the-string approach to learning and off-the-string stroke.
Now both of the methods I just mentioned — the upbow being a reaction to the downbow and just playing back and forth – later in my studies I kind of came to the idea that those weren’t the ideal. And I came up with a different way of thinking about it that I found more productive for myself. I find that the down-up produces an uneven stroke for most of the time the person is practicing it, which is not something you want them to struggle with for the rest of their career. So it’s much better to start to start with something even. The back and forth one does do it even, but I find that it – it isn’t quite as clear as it should be, and you aren’t actually coming from off the string; you’re learning it from on the string, which has some benefit. I don’t throw that one out completely; sometimes I actually have students do that to help them learn how to move their arm properly. But this next way is the way I really suggest teaching.
The way I have actually come up with teaching this, and it works pretty well, is basically to compare the way we bounce the bow to dribbling a ball. When you’re dribbling a ball, you bounce it and it hits the floor; the elasticity of the ball – it compresses, and then it throws itself back up into your hand. Your hand meets it before it reaches the top, and then throws it back down. This is kind of the way I’m thinking when I’m bouncing the bow. First, I have the student just bounce it straight up and down. There’s two ways of doing this. Either you can have them bounce their whole arm [demonstrates]; this is one way. But more effectively I find is a rotational flick of the wrist [demonstrates], and more importantly, the flick of this index and thumb mechanism. I can actually pulse it like this when I’m up in the air [demonstrates]; and the same way that my hand would hit the ball, my thumb and index finger are going to throw the bow back down with a little impulse. And so, I’m not trying to produce a sound at the moment, I’m just trying to throw the bow down as if I was bouncing a ball into the string, let it bounce back up, and at the top I use my thumb and index finger to throw it back down [demonstrates].
Once your student is able to kind of get the idea of feeling of the bow bounce, the string and the bow and the hair compress and then throw everything back out. I’ll do that again. Its – everything compresses; the string, the hair and the bow compresses and then it throws it back out. Once they get used to feeling that at the bottom of each stroke, the rubbery bounce that’s built into our instrument through all these different springs – and once they get used to managing the top of it, you can have them try to keep their arm as still as possible [demonstrates]. If you look at my elbow, my elbow is completely stationary. In fact, my wrist is almost completely stationary. Most of this is coming from my index finger, which you see looks exactly like it’s bouncing a ball [demonstrates]. It’s just bouncing it, and my thumb is offering the resistance to flick the bow down.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
10/19/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
Part 8: Deep Analysis of the Spiccato Stroke
The next aspect I throw at my student after they’re able to just go up and down with no rub at all – you aren’t pulling to either side, you’re just bouncing up and down – it really shouldn’t produce much sound. Just a thud; it’s more of a percussion motion. Then the next part I do, after I’m able to bounce, is I start tugging at the bottom of the stroke … uh, tugging isn’t the right word; I pluck, I time a little pluck at the bottom of where the hair, the string and the bow are most flexed. At that instance, I give a pluck; I either pluck in the downbow direction or I pluck in the upbow direction. And I have to time it very carefully. Because that pluck has to come just before the bottom of that stretch. This stretch happens in a microsecond; I mean, I slowed it down to show it just a minute ago, but when you’re actually in the heat of battle and things are bouncing the margin for error is very small. You have to time that pluck very perfectly, and when you do, you’re going to get a sound that sounds almost [demonstrates] like a muted guitar, you know, where someone lays their hand across the strings and they pluck with the pick and it makes this kind of “tick” sound. But it dies very quickly.
Once you’re able to do the kind of muted guitar – it’s tricky, because you have to pluck downbow [demonstrates] and then you have to pluck upbow [demonstrates]. And it’s almost exactly as if you were going like this [flicks finger back and forth over string]. But we aren’t used to plucking upbow; like this way, and doing it through the bow you can see it’s slightly more comfortable than it would be if I was actually plucking on the string [demonstrates]. A friend of mine called this stroke “ricky-ticky”, Jeff Kale actually, a guy I went to school with at Indiana; a great player. So I can’t take 100% credit for it. I’d been doing this a while before when I saw him practicing it, and he would do it in slow motion before a concert. He would come down, land, compress, pluck, go out, land, compress, pluck, and you could see it. He would actually – if I did it in here I’d hit Jason with my bow, because he would go out like three feet and make an exaggeration of it like this, as if he was loading it with all that energy of an arm coming at a string from three feet away. And it was such a neat idea, to me to watch someone just exaggerate that much. I fell in love with the idea and it made me exaggerate a little more, and improve my cleanliness. But this ricky-ticky stroke is – I call it the beginning of every off-the-string stroke I do [demonstrates]. Even if I set it on the string and do like a Mozart stroke [demonstrates], where it has more of a rub at the beginning of it, all I’m doing is changing the angle of my attack and shallowing it out. And I hit it at a lower angle, and all of a sudden I get a nice Mozart stroke. Add a little more rub to it [demonstrates] – but you can see my first finger, even in the Mozart stroke – I’m still plucking. I’m still doing the pluck, it’s just that I let my arm change the attack angle, and also I change the amount of rub I’m doing with the arm. But the first finger is still doing this [demonstrates], the bouncing of the bow, the ricky-ticky stroke, back and forth, just a tick.
Now in the same way that we went from – after we were able to do nice long notes, we broke it up into little pieces on the string … the same idea applies to doing it this way, and you might be able to do [demonstrates] – when you’re doing it ricky-ticky stroke with a tiny little pluck at the bottom of each bounce, you might be able to get away with eight but the idea is you want them to all sound identical. Down [demonstrates]. And you might even leave it in one place [demonstrates]; you might not go out and back and forth, because the physics of the bow changes as you go toward the tip. It becomes less manageable as you get out here, a little lighter and skating over the top. So I like to do it kind of in the middle, and I’ll have the student just draw circles with their hand, and at the top of the circle they’re going to throw it down and bounce the ball, and when they reach the bottom, they’re going to follow it with their finger all the way down, grab it and pluck [demonstrates]. It’s a series of downbow plucks. And then I have them go to upbow [demonstrates]. And when you go from downbow, which is from my perspective looking down, it’s a counterclockwise circle. Then when I go to upbow, I change directions. And it’s somewhat simple that way; there’s upbow [demonstrates] – downbow [demonstrates]. You can see the circle I’m drawing. And what you want to eventually be able to do is maybe go from four downs, four ups, three downs, three ups, two downs, two ups, one down, one up, and see if you can make them all sound the same [demonstrates].
Once your student’s able to do a back and forth ricky-ticky downbow, upbow, back and forth, all sounds exactly the same, nice clean grab the string and let it go, plucking with the bow… Now what we have to add – and this is why I say, this is the beginning of every stroke I do – now I’m going to change, I have variables I can change. I can change how high I’m coming off the string, the speed of my attack; I can change the amount of weight I’m going to lay into the string at the bottom of the attack, I can change the angle of the attack, whether it’s going to come straight down or whether I’m going to attack it from the side, with a lower angle of attack. And then, in addition to all of those, I can also change the amount of time I stay on the string and rub. And so you have the beginning of the notes here [demonstrates]. Let’s say I want to make them slightly longer, because most of the time you aren’t going to play a lick [demonstrates] for instance; that’s silly. So you’ve got to add the body to each of these notes. We have the beginnings of them, but now we need to add a body. So I have my tick at the bottom of each stroke, when I feel the strings stretch, I’m simply going to play a note [demonstrates]. And then I’m going to come off, and attack from the air again [demonstrates]. Now what you’ll notice is, as I’m doing it, you see my first finger is still doing this [demonstrates]. It’s just that I’m allowing the weight of my arm to stay on the string a little bit before I come off. And I can stretch it out in slow motion a little bit longer; but now I’m having to do more work because I’m actually having to hold it in the air rather than let the bow kick it out. But you can go almost any tempo, and as you speed up you get smaller [demonstrates]. But even at that high speed you can still see my first finger kind of pumping the bow in a very quick succession of pizzicatos.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
Contrabass Conversations
10/24/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
Part 9: Different Spiccato Strokes for Different Situations
Now, I already mentioned that you’re able to do this, but I want to demonstrate a few of them. Like for instance, a Mozart stroke: it has a little bit more of a brushed sound. And so, what I’m going to do, I’m going to – instead of coming at it from straight above, this is the most severe vertical angle [demonstrates with bow], I’m going to flatten that attack out. So instead of coming down like this, I’m going to come at it more soft, more at a low angle [demonstrates]. And I’m probably going to turn the hair out a little, so I can flatten out the ribbon of hair on each bounce … and you can hear how it gets a much softer sound. Less severe attack. And you can see that I’m moving from side to side more than I am up and down. That’s one of the key elements of this stroke, is that I go side to side instead of up and down. Now if I wanted to suddenly shift to like a more hammered stroke, all of a sudden the equation would change. Instead of moving side to side like this, I’m going to go up and down more and load it with the weight of my arm [demonstrates]. Now you can see that the angle I’m attacking at is almost vertical. And you can see that I’m loading it with – my whole arm is shaking; I’m throwing my arm into the string. And I might move a little closer to the frog. And that creates this great ferocious bark of the bass. Which is really fun for – you know, certain things [demonstrates] – I’ll get teased for that, cause I always play that! But that’s the fundamental of that stroke. And somewhere in between might be what you’d use for that Beethoven I was playing [demonstrates] – something more like that.
The great thing about this stroke is that you can actually pause in mid-stroke and think about what you’re doing. [demonstrates] Like in that excerpt for instance, I like being able to pause and each time I pause, I’m thinking about how I’m going to grow in the next few notes. When I put it together, I sometimes can get a nice crescendo [demonstrates]. Like that. So that’s some of the ways you can vary this stroke. It can go from like a martele, which is a very vertical stroke, to more of the brushed Mozart stroke, to somewhere in-between. And I really like it.
One of the things I want to talk about as well about this stroke is – in general, as I go onto the top string I’m going to use more of a rub, and as I go to the thicker lower strings I’m going to reduce my rub and go more towards the literal ricky-ticky. And the reason I do that, is because as you go into the lower register the bass rings a lot more. [demonstrates]. And the vibrations are wider. That’s almost identical – I mean, that’s a really short stroke. But I might err on that side for the sake of cleanliness [demonstrates]. There, on a C string you can even hear all the notes. This is literally the ricky-ticky stroke, just grabbing it and letting it go. In each direction; you can see the string flex and release. As I go up – let’s say I play a scale [demonstrates]. As I get up to the G string, I’m going to soften it and make it more like the Mozart stroke [demonstrates]. And the sound will actually remain somewhat the same.
One of the most common problems I see my students run into when they try to take the ricky-ticky stroke, which is the pluck, and add the rub to it, is that a lot of times, they exaggerate the rub too much and they think they have to do it very quickly. Most of the speed in the stroke happens vertically. And when you actually set it down on the string, the moment it’s touching the string, it should again be a cross-section of that long, beautiful note. And you can see how slow this long, beautiful note is moving. It’s not [demonstrates] – it’s not like that! And a lot of people, when they’re trying to speed it up or play this off-the-string stroke and add a rub, they start doing something like this, where they’re not actually [demonstrates] – they’re skating over the top of the string. And usually what happens is, I’ll tell them to go back to the ricky-ticky and try just – do a couple of them, set the bow down, and pull a straight note. As if you weren’t even bouncing; just, from the air, grab the string and pull. Off – grab the string and pull. Off – grab the string and pull. Off – grab the string and pull. And try to get, literally, cross sections of that long beautiful note. And each of the tiny notes that you’re grabbing from the air, when they’re touching the string, should be at the same speed as that nice note. So you get something like this [demonstrates]. And sometimes it helps to go back to doing this a couple times [demonstrates] where they do a bunch of notes in a row, but as part of this long beautiful note. And then have them take the length of one of those – just play one – there’s one of them – then play that same one in each direction [demonstrates] with a tiny lift at the end. And sometimes that helps. This is probably the trickiest part of learning this stroke, is going from dribbling the bow and the little tick, to being able to somehow combine it with the beauty of the on-the-string stroke. Which is really what you want.
One of the things, when I have a student in front of me, that I usually try to do is, I’ll start attacking the problem from eight or nine different angles. And I’ll eventually start zeroing in on what the real problem is. It’s obviously impossible for me to do that, because I have no idea who’s watching this! But I’m trying to throw out some of the ideas of how to deal with the problems. And a lot of times what happens is, you can go back to the basic beginning of the stroke and build it again. And if you keep going back to that zero point and adding little things in, eventually you can kind of isolate which part of it specifically is throwing you the loop. And that is really the problem-solving that goes on in a lesson. But there’s no reason you can’t do it on your own to some degree; in fact, you have to be able to because that’s what practicing is!
There actually is a stroke that happens between an off-the-string stroke and an on-the-string stroke. [demonstrates] Somewhere between this, where I’m coming off a mile, and this, where I’m not coming off at all, exists a stroke where the stick is bouncing but the hair doesn’t leave the string. And there’s a little lift at the end where I release the weight [demonstrates]. But I don’t actually take the bow off. This is a very useful stroke for playing clean, and I use it all the time. And especially as you start playing fast, an off-the-string stroke – eventually you don’t have time to really come off. And so — I’m trying to think of something to play – even if I took that same Beethoven excerpt [demonstrates], I’m really not flying off the string. I’m keeping it as close as I can so I can play fast. And as I speed it up, it is going to get smaller, and by virtue of that, eventually [demonstrates] you can see the bow bouncing but the hair really is staying with the string.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
Contrabass Conversations
10/25/07
Exploring the Double Bass with Andrew Anderson
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Grant Park Symphony
Chicago College of Performing Arts
Part 10: Developing Left Hand Proficiency
A lot of times, if a student is having fingers flying away while they’re trying to play the scale, I’ll actually have them play it … like, for an entire week, I’ll have everything they play, they have to have all their fingers touching the string all the time. And this sounds particularly bad when you’re playing a first finger, because [plays] these three [fingers 2-3-4], I actually feel the string tickling the bottom of them, and it makes this muted, kind of wolf-note sound. If you can see, they aren’t pushing the string down, but they’re touching it. And so that’s the first note of the scale. And so it’ll go like this: [plays] there’s Bb, C, D … I leave them all down … move first over; I only move a finger when I need it. [plays rest of scale]. So that’s all fingers down all the time.
There’s another variation on it. Instead of moving them, I actually don’t change the way I would play it … like, normally when I play I don’t start with my fingers on another string, I start with them right above. [plays]. And so that’s this way; that’s the way I first started playing. So even on the open D I’ll have them all touch. [plays] Open G … [plays].
In general, when I approach the bass, I use a pretty traditional Samandahl style of hand position. But there are some variations on it that are particularly useful when you’re faced with challenging passages that aren’t very idiomatic with that. It’s borrowed a bit from different schools of thought around the world in bass playing. So you have the traditional Samandahl position, where as you move from one position to the next, the thumb moves with you, almost like a plastic hand, up and down the neck. So there’s that. Then there’s another one, where you might cover two or three positions in a Samandahl-like view from the front; your fingers remain in this kind of equal length of string between 1, 2 and 4. But then, you’re going to move the thumb in kind of a neutral position between several positions. And this is kind of a quasi — well, not quasi; it IS a pivot! But the only difference is, I’m maintaining a Samandahl position on top of it. So my thumb might be behind my first, it might be behind my second, or it might be behind my fourth. And I can easily access all these positions off the thumb. Sometimes this is particularly useful if you have to go back and forth between two positions very quickly. Like, let’s say from an Eb to an F#. If you had to do an Eb to an F# back and forth very quickly, you could leave the thumb in place, but from the front, it actually looks like I’m shifting! [chuckles]. It’s a nice little illusion. So there’s that.
Then, on top of that, there’s a third technique in which you’re actually going to open your hand up and either use 1, 2, and 4 or 1, 3 and 4. I don’t actually ever use 1, 2, 3, 4. I’m actually adding a half-step to the hand. I never use this position I’m demonstrating right now [1, 2, 3 and 4], because if you look at the back of my hand, there’s tendons sticking out and it looks incredibly uncomfortable. So what I’ll do is I’ll relax part of my hand; at least one of the fingers has to be relaxed. I’ll use 1, 3, 4 or 1, 2, 4. And I’ll kind of stack the hand that way; in general, I try not to hold them in this position, because it can get pretty awkward very quickly.
So I’ve talked about Samandahl, a Samandahl combined with a pivot, and then an open hand position. Some people call it extended, but that denotes exactly the sensation I’m trying to avoid while doing it; I don’t want to extend, I just want to open my hand up. So I’d prefer to call it that. Four-finger technique is sometimes used. And then, this a lot of times is used in passages that could also be played like this, with the thumb [puts thumb on string]. In any part of the bass, you could throw the thumb back. It’s a little bit easier of a technique if you play sitting. I prefer to play standing, so I tend to do this more [open hand technique]. But it’s a nice transition to go up into this part of the neck.
Now, transitioning between a Samandahl and open position or any other lower-position type hand shape to the thumb position — there’s this nebulous area right here [gestures where neck meets body], and Jeff Branetich advocates using the third finger as soon as you can when you’re heading up to thumb position. And I agree with that, and I think in general he advocates it in this part of the bass. The only time I prefer not to do it is — if I’m not going up to thumb position, I will still use 4; I won’t start using my third, because I don’t want to be going back and forth if I don’t have to. If I’m doing an open hand position here, I probably will use third. So it’s kind of a — if you’re going there or you’re coming — pretty much, I shape the hand based on where I’m going. If I’m going to thumb position, I’m going to start incorporating the third sooner. If I’m going to an open position I probably will consider it. If I’m just staying down here and doing more of a Samandahl-type way of approaching the bass, I’m probably going to keep fourth in this part of the neck.
Fingerboard Visualization
This last little bit is kind of an intellectual thing. It’s the way I visualize the fingerboard of the bass in my mind, and the way I number the positions in kind of a traditional Samandahl style. It came about from me having to read cello parts in a string quartet at pitch, and I was not really educated at that point to be comfortable up there. And so I did a kind of a little mental game, where I just pretended that my half-string harmonic was my open string, so — [bows some harmonic half strings, then open] there’s your open string. And then half position is just right above that. And so what I would do, is in thumb position I would just come off my fourth finger and replace it with the third, but in essence I would treat the positions exactly the same. So half position: here’s your half-string harmonic [plays] and a half-step above that is half position. A whole step above it is first. Above that, two … or one and a half, depending on the numbering system; there’s all sorts of questions about that.
Basically, you can take anything you’re going to play down here in this part of the neck [near the nut], and you can play it with exactly the same fingering up here [over the body]. And that’s kind of what I did; I even would go across to the C, which is — for a five-string tune, the way I tune mine – it worked out very well for sight-reading cello parts, because in thumb position I had basically the range minus a note that they did in their open strings, and I could just set it down and read it in my basic kind of Samandahl hand positions – equal length of string between each finger – measure my shifts the same way, put them in the same place I would down here [gestures to top of fingerboard], but just exactly up an octave.
And the same thing can be done up another octave [plays down near bridge]. And the only difference here is — sometimes fitting three fingers, if your fingers are as fat as mine, becomes a chore. So sometimes, I’ll let the second finger play the role of two fingers, and do a little sliding back and forth. But, up here –I don’t play up there that much, as you can tell by all the rosin — [gestures to bridge] but when I do, I try to employ that little mind trick to make the bass seem smaller. Kind of like a piano, where you have one octave, and the next octave is exactly identical, it uses the same fingerings, all the notes are kind of in the same place, they’re just half as far apart. That’s the only difference from the piano, is the notes are twice as close together. And as you go up again, you have exactly the same thing in the final octave, and the notes are half as far apart again. So in some ways, it actually made it seem like this octave was easier than this one [gestures from bridge to top of fingerboard]. Because here the notes are so far apart, and I had to travel a mile to get to them. But when I jumped up an octave, they became so much closer together; it actually made it easier for me to think of this part of the bass geographically.
Concluding Remarks
Well, I hope that some of these ideas – these ideas aren’t THE way of playing, it’s just the way that I’ve kind of come to think about the way I play. Each person’s going to be a little different, so you’re just going to have to discover all these – like, things I’ve discovered for me, you’re going to have to discover them for you. And you’re going to combine all the different things you hear from different people, the things you see in their playing that you admire; you’re going to borrow it, and eventually you’re going to be a universal plagiarist for everyone you love. You’re just going to take what’s good about them and incorporate it in your own playing and the way you think about the bass. And so hopefully some of these ideas, you’ll say, “Yeah, I can use that”, and if so, I’m completely delighted that this is out there. And if you ever have questions, I hope you’ll hunt me down and find me and ask me the question, because a lot of this stuff — I really love talking about it, and I enjoy working with people to try to fix these things if they’re having trouble with them. Nothing gets me going more than that. So you know where to find me, through Jason’s site, or I work at Lyric, in Grant Park, and I teach at Roosevelt, so that’s where you can find me.
Study with Andy: visit ccpa.roosevelt.edu
A contrabassconversations.com production
TRANSCRIBED BY DARLENE MARSHALL
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