Focused on practising

This evening, I was not supposed to be on duty, but I had scheduled for a night session with my clients. In the end, the session had to be postponed to another evening. As such, I left for home after having dinner at my workplace.

At home, I found myself playing on the double bass eventually. The weather earlier this evening was rather hot, but I felt my mood tonight was definitely better than last night.

My double bass did not sound ideal this evening. It gave a rattling sound at its scroll , and I have yet to figure out what has caused the undesired rattling. Anyway, I tried to stay focused on practising the D major scales and the B minor scales. It remained to be quite a fun experience trying to practise scales with accompaniment. I still needed more practice to perfect some parts. Anyway, playing scales has been more pleasant lately, and I have managed to play the D major scales and B minor scales reasonably alright.

After practising the scales, I practised Badinerie from Bach's Suite No. 2. Basically, my goal was to familiarise myself with the fingerings for this piece of music, so that the fingerings would come naturally even when I have to play this piece at a much faster tempo. Good articulation isn't easy to achieve at the actual tempo, so I tried to make practice more manageble by working out my right-hand's (the hand that holds the bow) articulation at a slower tempo. My goal was simply to achieve as clear articulation as possible with the right hand, and get the right hand used to all those strings-crossing in the various passages.

Hopefully, these short but focused practises could help me play better with the orchestra. The conductor seemed to pay comparatively more attention on the cellos and double basses for this section from Bach's Suite No. 2. I just hope that practising would help me manage better with the pressure from the conductor. Somehow, quality practice has the power of endowing the player with a greater confidence. With confidence, playing seems to usually sound better.