Today's lesson

Double bass lesson for this week has been rescheduled to today.

Before the double bass lesson, I played a few studies from F. Simandl's New Method for the Double Bass Book 1. It feels good to realise that I am now able to produce a clearer and warmer sound on the double bass while playing the very same study that I have played about eight years ago. Practising and receiving good guidance do help.

Lesson today started with playing of C major scales. My tutor gave me pointers on how I can enable my left-hand to be play notes with more fluidity.

Afterwhich, we worked on Keyper's Romance and Rondo. I quite like the melody of this piece of music. It seems a challenge to play it musically. My tutor's analogy is that Romance should be played as if it was intended for someone whom one loves. My tutor said that there should be some kind of variation in the dynamics at appropriate places as love, in itself, has its ups and downs. Well, the point that I was trying to make is that playing music does require one to have lots of imagination.

For Rondo, my tutor proposed that for this very movement, it is best to achieve the required sound by playing the harmonics using as short a length from the tip of the bow. This does work!

Today's lesson also worked on how I could get a nice warm, open and ringing tone. My tutor demonstrated and got me to experience how the placement of the fingers on the bow does matter in the quality of the sound.

It appears that if I would like a louder, more open sound whereby the entire bass vibrate in a warm manner, I would have to try to place the index finger and middle finger apart from each other, and place the middle finger fairly close to the ring finger. According to my tutor, if the little finger were to be placed somewhere just above the eye of the frog (of my bow), it would help make the sound produced by the drawing of my bow to have a stronger bass quality.

In addition, today's lesson made me realised that in creating that warm, open tone whereby the stopped notes sound as if they were open notes, I would need to relax my left-hand too.

After the lesson, I realised that my whole mind kept humming Romance from Keyper's Romance and Rondo. I started singing the melody out in public while I was walking along the City Link underground walkways. Please bear with me if you happen to hear me humming the tune out loud in public. I just wanted to work out how to make Romance sound more musical and expressive.