You may have seen this graphic before:

Today I’m going to tease these elements apart.
mechanics and approach: the foundation
What we do is, at its core, a physical enterprise. Yet, sometimes it can feel like this wild mental scramble to simultaneously decode notes on the page, parse them into correct rhythms, and then manufacture those decoded and parsed notes on an expensive box with wires stretched across its nose (or a pipe with some holes and/or buttons in it, or a bit of former tree with bangy hammers and 2/3 a harp lying down inside it).

The most important thing about any physical pursuit is to do it correctly.
Well yes, Emily. Do you think this is new information? Do you think I’m making mistakes on purpose?
Of course not. But in my experience, many students don’t practice very well because they’re 1. playing, not practicing and 2. not giving themselves the opportunity to succeed, playing far too quickly or inattentively to get the physical stuff right.
[If you don’t really know the difference between playing and practicing, I’ll do an updated post on that in the coming weeks.]
In the first criterion, I state that the mechanics should come first, then pitches. It’s not that intonation and accuracy aren’t important, but playing well tuned notes with lousy, unsustainable technique is like cooking dinner without utensils. Sure, I guess you can do it that way, but it will likely be artless, and you’re gonna hurt yourself. The method is everything. There are instructors who will argue that what I’m saying is heresy. Burn me at the stake, I guess.

Playing in tune is the result of a sort of math:

The quality and quantity of each element contributes to the final product. It makes sense when you think of it: subtract that “time” element, for instance. Of course people with very little time on a stringed instrument are going to have wild pitch. We all accept that. People with excellent technique need less of the time quantity—think about wünderkinds whose parents luck into teachers gifted at teaching tiny students who also emphasize correct left hand technique and positioning. Quality, the aspect of practice this whole post is devoted to, is the reason why Suzuki mandates the parents of those tiny students learn along and practice with them. They know that quality is everything if you’re in a hurry to make some progress. Alas, adults are every bit as inattentive and hopeful for shortcuts as kids are. The sooner you can wrangle the quality of your technique into shape, the easier the path becomes.
Universal Changes
This is a simple one, yet wowzers do folks persist in ignoring it. Making a change universal means that you bring your new information and skills to everything else. Relaxed thumb in the scale? Relaxed thumb in your orchestral music. Breathing during your solo piece? Breathing the rest of the time. Ševčík mid bow spiccato drops from the air with a loose shoulder? All mid bow spiccato drops from the air with a loose shoulder.
Failing to see the universal applications of your physical work on the instrument sets you up for much more labor. It’s also usually a symptom of inattentive practice and being detached from your body. I understand this deeply—I played for years feeling like a set of eyes attached to a small (some would say extremely small) bit of brain that made the tips of my fingers do stuff. As such, every piece started me at close to zero: fingertips don’t know where they are on the fingerboard. But the arm does. And the rest of the body knows where that arm is. Coupled with the next step, auditating, being able to shift your awareness from just your left fingers to a variety of focal points is what gives you a sense for where everything is, and how to get there.
An exercise to cultivate awareness: play something simple while moving your mind’s eye to a few different target areas. If it’s difficult to get away from the left fingers, use a prop, like resting something on your foot, or balancing something light on the top of your head, or applying something tingly like Tiger Balm on the area you’d like to feel as you play. Weird? Yes. Effective? Also yes.
Audiating
Audiating is simply internal hearing. There are myriad reasons why being able to produce sound inside your mind is essential, from testing out phrasing ideas to remembering the context of your orchestral part. When we’re speaking of practice quality, the most common way we use audiation is to target the next note we need to play. Doing this does more than tell you if you’re out of tune. The brain actually makes better guesses as to where to put your fingers with a secondary source of information about distance. So, your brain tells your fingers to go x number of centimeters based on the way notes look on the page (why do you think shifts over a clef change are so hard?), approximate relation to the fingerboard length, all kinds of things…but the brain LOVES having an auditory process to match the auditory result that’s coming out of your instrument. Playing without audiating is like doing archery without looking at the target.
Organized Shifting
This has two primary dimensions: you should reach the destination with your hand in a useful position, always with soft spaces between the fingers, and with a real resemblance to whatever handful of notes you’ll be playing next. I usually make an exception for extensions: it’s dicey to try and land with an extended shape, and the essence of a shift is loose and light. Splaying the fingers, even in a relaxed way, can make a shift feel weird. Still, this is context dependent. Some very quick passages might end up requiring an approach that will certainly feel like you’re landing in an extended position, for sure.
The second aspect is the way you measure your shifts. I always recommend old finger shifts for mapping out moves, and in instances where the same finger begins and ends a shift, you can measure by keeping track of where 1 starts and ends. I wrote a whole post about this method of shifting here. This doesn’t mean that the finished product will be an old finger shift (though they are more common than new finger ones, due to the more pronounced sliding sound they tend to produce) but in my experience, learning a shift using the old finger cuts way down on the time you need to learn it.
Correct Rhythmic Structure
This doesn’t just mean with the notes in the right place—although that is certainly the business end of this idea. String players are notoriously bad with counting, largely because the ensembles we play in allow us to hide in our relatively large numbers compared to our friends in woodwind, brass, and percussion, where every attack has to be precise. The subtlety of the bow also means we can be ambiguous with the way we begin and end notes. All of this combines to make it easy to get pretty good at a stringed instrument without having a real understanding of rhythm.
The correct structure also means counting in 2 when it’s going to played in 2. Learning by subdividing isn’t terrible, but it’s important to do more than just survive the rhythm. Pieces are in different meters for reasons (most of the time), and it changes the entire feel of a phrase when it is counted in the meter. A trite but effective example: marches are written to be counted in 2. Sometimes they’re written in 4, but it’s still to imply 2+2, because marching involves 2 feet taking 2 steps over and over again. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2. Can you imagine how weird it would be to try and march counting one e and a two e and a? Notice also how different the quality of the counting is. Counting in 2 tends to be sharp and stable. When you subdivide, the actual internal pulse can rush, swing, or neuter the actual time feel of the music.
A practical tip for developing a better sense for time feel and pulse: listen to non classical music and see where you want to tap your foot. Experiment with halving the number of taps, or doubling it. Whether or not it’s your cup of tea, dubstep music is excellent at showing how powerful shifting the time feel is, even as the BPM remains the same. Listen to this:
Hear how the music sounds absolutely huge when the emphasis goes from smaller subdivisions to the larger ones? This is a version of the change that can happen if you pay attention to the way the music was written, how it was purposefully put together to create a time feel. Cool huh?
Reasonable but High Standards
This last one is the underpinning of everything that comes before, really. Your standards are always changing as you improve, but remember that you can’t measure new skills with the old yardstick—something I see students doing frequently. Put simply, if you’ve gotten to a place where you can expect to do some piece of technique correctly, it is not helpful to eviscerate yourself for being at a different stage of the game on an unrelated technique. I see this most often with vibrato work. I only start folks on vibrato after their pitch accuracy is well developed (otherwise they turn into musicians who mask dodgy intonation with it). Vibrato is fundamentally a distortion of the pitch center, and it is necessary to let go of the security a non-moving hand provides in the pursuit of the artistry associated with this new technique. Yet, it’s natural for a student used to playing well in tune to be revolted by how wild and wooly their pitch gets when learning to vibrate, or how uncoordinated they feel. There is a temptation to become frustrated and sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater: “I was doing so well and now I sound like wobbly garbage!” Your vibrato may sound rough, but you haven’t regressed. The goalposts have moved, and they will move forever, if you’re lucky.
Funny thing, our standards. We complain when we’re in a plateau, yet the very sign that we are making progress—struggle—is treated like an unwanted visitor. Are you quite sure you want to learn at all? Or do you want to be magically wonderful? The sooner you get comfortable with the idea that the struggle means you’re on the right path, the more joyful that path will be. I promise.
hugs,
Em