June 17, 2024
Becoming a good string player is overrated. It requires loads of tiresome work and endless hours of practice. A much better idea would be to aim for the goal of not succeeding, and there are a variety of ways you can do that. True, you may reach higher levels of music, gain a larger audience, and greatly increase your playing skills if you aim to succeed in the musical world, but if your goal is to become the best worst string player ever, then check out these 7 tips.
1. Avoiding Problems Always Works
Don’t figure out the root of the problem. Just don’t. Not only is it stressful and helpful to attaining success, but you’ll have way more fun practicing the stuff you like.
Some string players, such as high school director Adam Davis, would argue that it does no good to just play through a piece from start to finish as intended or to play only your favorite parts. Davis even states that “if you’re just running through the section, you’re going to be practicing your mistakes and you’ll always have the mistakes.”
But of course, this is advice from a successful string player. Sub-tip? Mistakes are your friend. Keep them. Don’t listen to musicians when they say to isolate the problem spot and complicate it with varied rhythms, playing backwards, or opposite phrasings. Doing that would be ludicrous—and you might accidentally succeed if you did!
2. Skip the Scales
Yup. You heard me—skip them. Practicing scales can lead to building muscle memory which Esmée Kuiper, a violinist who has played for 15 years, says is “a huge part of mastering any technique, especially because a lot of the techniques . . . require a lot of control.”
The threat here? Muscle memory might lead to improved playing and therefore success. Many string players will say that playing scales is essential for building a foundation and helping with intonation, but don’t listen to them. This is a sure-fire way to success.
3. Tenseness is the Trick
Make sure your right hand is gripping the bow like your life depends on it. If you start to get pain and your knuckles turn white, you’re doing it correctly.
Don’t listen to suggestions like this advice from music teacher Hannah York: “Make sure that your hands are relaxed…because naturally fast and tense passages make us feel more tense.” Feeling tense is natural and should stay that way.
If you follow this bad advice, you will run into the dilemma of your wrist, arm, and elbow also loosening up and then you’ll find it easier to play more fluidly, more quickly, and your playing will improve. As can obviously be seen, relaxation should be left for Netflix and Chill time, not music. Always keep it tense.
4. Stay Away from Repetition . . .
Remember the muscle memory dangers mentioned earlier? Well that could happen here too. Repeating measures when practicing will slowly pound the correct techniques into your fingers and start erasing all the mistakes you should be keeping.
In Christopher Sutton’s Q and A article, “Effective Practice: Lessons from Neuroscience and Psychology, with Gregg Goodhart,” Gregg Goodhart explains the damage of repetition. Our neurons send out electrochemical impulses to create connections (synapses) when we learn new things. These connections start out weak but can grow stronger by repeated actions which send out more electrochemical impulses and insulate the axons, the paths for the connections, with myelin.
“So, each time you do a repetition,” says Goodhart, “a little bit of myelin…insulates the axon so that the signal can stay strong and travel faster.”
Creating a bad habit of repetition will eventually lead to the loss of all your mistakes and acquisition of unwanted musical achievement. So stay away—you have been warned.
5. . . . Unless You Follow This Rule
Okay, so, not all repetition is bad.
Here’s the trick, though: you gotta keep all repetition sessions consistent. Play it exactly as written—no changes, no nothin’. If you continue to practice without accidentally fixing any mistakes, those mistakes will stay and become a permanent part of your music.
Goodhart describes how practicing in this way creates an axon (connective link) of this perfect incorrect playing. Goodhart explains that “if you practice [the music] even a little bit incorrectly, you are myelinating the wrong axons.”
In other words, you’re strengthening the connections you’ve made with the mistake-riddled repetition and therefore strengthening your probability of success at not being a success. Follow the Rule: keep repetition consistent.
6. Slowing Down is for Losers
Slow is boring. It’s not fun to play slow and can cause some serious damage to your no-success goal.
Cornerstone University Professor, Kayla Cordell, opposes this view, saying that when there’s a section containing a faster tempo than you’re used to, “you have to slow it down and break it apart in the smallest segments possible.”
The problem with this is, it forces you to focus on the problem and slowly train your fingers to shift to the correct spots and build up a familiarity that will become present when you try playing as written. Sure, you might be able to learn to play even faster than you currently can, but that takes time and the wrong kind of repetition.
If you wanna be unsuccessful, then don’t lower the tempo. Always play it fast.
7. Don’t be Patient
Success takes time. Lots of time. The easiest way to avoid it is to simply be impatient. Don’t linger too long on a hard piece—move on to another! Can’t figure out a technique? Give it up. It wasn’t for you anyway.
Hannah York offers an example of bad advice about vibrato, wrongly saying to “be very patient, keep working at it, [and] try all sorts of different exercises.”
Becoming impatient will save you from the consequences of this advice and many others like it: you will not successfully build speed, better your vibrato, or learn new rhythms and techniques. Being impatient will lead you to your desired unsuccess.
Whether or not you decide to aim for the goal of unsuccess is up to you, of course. Keep these tips in mind and do with them what you will but remember—success can be a dangerously marvelous thing.
Comments