Practice Warm up and technical Routine

“The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.” 

― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

The first daily approach to the instrument must be extremely relaxed and natural. Don't start playing with difficult and fast exercises, play slowly and listen to your body and mind, like a zen exercise.

The first thing I like doing is playing open strings with the bow, very slowly and listening to my sound. I can put a metronome at 60 (the quarter note) and play each note two bars long, distributing the bow equally.

A good exercise for relaxation is also to play glissato with your left hand on the fingerboard, from the low positions to thumb positions, without playing any particular note, just feeling the movements that the muscles have to do to play all along the fingerboard smooth and natural.

"Stop thinking about the moment of shooting!" exclaimed the Master. "So you can only fail!". "I can't do otherwise," I replied, "the tension becomes even painful". "You only experience this feeling because you are not really detached from yourself. And yet everything is so simple. An ordinary bamboo leaf can teach you what it is all about. Under the weight of the snow, it bends down, ever lower and lower. And suddenly the snow load slips away without the leaf moving. Stay like it in maximum tension until the blow starts. It is like this: when the tension has reached its limit, the blow must start, it must detach from the archer like the load of snow from the bamboo leaf, before he even thinks about it".

― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

As for right hand pizzicato start playing open strings. Put your fingers on the string you want to play (let's say G) and let them rest, feeling the natural weight of your arm that flows towards the string and then release it plucking the string and letting your fingers rest on the string below (in this case D). This can be played with any pizzicato technique: two fingers together, only index, only middle, alternating… When you pluck the string imagine to keep sustaining the note, as if you were playing with the bow. It is important that your arm has no tension that prevents the natural flow of the weight, you should feel the movement coming from the back muscles, more than from the arm itself. 

Then you can do the same thing but playing scales and arpeggios, still slowly and trying to play long sustained notes and enjoying your sound. Try also to feel the difference in sound when you go towards he upper positions. As your goal is to keep it homogeneous feel what happens if you change the position of the right hand; the more you left hand goes upwards the more you should go up with the right hand towards the bridge, try to experiment and find the point of the string where you feel it sounds better for every note.

Play also scales with ties on the downbeat and on the offbeat (ex.1). You will have to change the left hand fingerings according to the ties, so that the two tied notes are always played in the same position and on the same string.

Then choose the articulation profile of a bebop phrase you like and play that scheme on a scale (ex.2). The notes with a small accent are the landing notes of the phrases. I’ll talk more about articulation in next lessons.

For string crossing there are a lot of combinations and exercises, two good ones are these: 1- play a G major scale on the G string while alternating each note with the D string. You can use only one finger (index or middle) or alternating. You can play the same on the other strings (ex. D major scale on D string alternating with open A); 2- Choose a scale and play thirds (ex. on G and D) as shown. (Ex. 3). In both the exercises you can start with the index or the middle finger, the important is keeping the pattern.

To start fully waking up your left hand you can play trills, they will help to strengthen the hand and articulate better. Choose a metronomic speed and play trills with quarter notes, eight notes and semiquavers. Do that chromatically all along the neck (also thumb position). (Ex. 4)

I have always found very useful the exercises developed by Franco Petracchi, in particular the exercise of the fifths (Ex. 5). You have to play it chromatically all along the fingerboard; the exercise originally goes also in thumb position but you can also stop when you reach the C on the second string and come back. Two variations presented here work on octaves. Once you are practical you can play them with articulation variations (with the bow and pizzicato too). I won’t show them all here but if you want to know more you can check out the book on Petracchi’s site and you can buy it in many bookshops and online stores, it’s a very useful resource.

Petracchi developed also great exercises for the thumb position, playing all along the neck the chromatic, semi chromatic and diatonic positions.

In Ex. 6 the chromatic and semi chromatic positions are shown. You have to play them up and down (E-F-F#-G and then back G-F#-F-E) and go on chromatically starting on F, F# and so on until you reach the high G with the third finger. Then you can come back.

In Ex. 7 and Ex.8 the Major and Minor Diatonic positions are shown, starting from G