Here’s a natural pattern on the guitar that’s kind of “twisty.” Going down is more of a pattern, going up is a loose pattern. The accents are important. I’ll have to start posting sound clips, too, but for now, here’s the sheet music.

Note about Jaws and Violins.

If you push your jaw toward the violin that creates a lot of extra muscle work.  If you let your jaw be in a neutral position, then you can use the weight of your head to support the violin. Clenching your jaw every time you play is just too much extra work.

Other things I know about the jaw and violin:

Your head is heavy enough to balance the violin, like a seesaw that pivots on your collarbone, so you don’t need extra muscle pushing down on the chin rest to keep the instrument in place.

The jaw muscles are “pound for pound the strongest muscles in the body.” They told me this at at Alexander Technique workshop.

The Alexander teachers also recommended that violinists have more than one way to orient their head to the instrument. This is especially necessary if you’re playing into a mic but you need to look to one side or the other.

An open mouth space and relaxed face helps tone. One good way to go back to a relaxed position is by singing. Another good way is by “resistance stretching” — that is, pushing with your hand and back with your jaw. Another thing to try is exhaling and relaxing.

Often overlooked at first by students, the jaw, tongue, neck habits can be critical. We must guard against TMJ and other overuse. Like all technique, we have to be vigilant so we can avoid injury and also play better. It sounds almost goody-goody, that last sentence, but in my experience it’s quite true.

Bows can make a huge difference in the sound (seems like stating the obvious). The qualities each of us wants in our bow may be totally different, but if you take a violin and play it with a bunch of different bows, especially bows with different weights, the sound you get changes with each bow. (Different shoulder rests even change the sound, if you use one. Makes sense, it’s attached to the instrument so it must effect how it resonates, and even more so with the bow.)

The following suggestions are made with beginning improvisers in mind, though they are good general principles for everyone.

1. Think ahead. Learn to hear a melody in your head, visualize how to play it on the instrument and play it– all within a split second or so.

2. Seek ultimate variety in melodies, phrase length, ammount of rests and notes, and note patterns. Play with expectations. Allow yourself to be surprised, too.

3. Practice scales and patterns. These are the building blocks and the cannon fodder.

4. Learn harmony. Track the chords as you play tunes, or at least be able to do so easily if you want to. A familiar tune should be like a drive through a familiar city. At each moment you know exactly where you are and you can picture the route you’ll take to your next destination. You also know many possible routes you might choose to take.

5. Play “ideas” not notes. Just as we should think a note or two ahead so as to be prepared, on a grander scale, we should endeavor to play a sound we conceive in our head. This is different from just rearranging notes and patterns we’re familiar with. Rearranging notes and patterns is one way to think when improvising, but if it’s just playing riffs with nothing to balance it out, it can get old pretty quick.

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PRACTICES

Play over a drone. Good for intonation and coming up with ideas. Also, more fun than playing alone.

Get as familiar as you can with the styles you want to emulate.

Make up scale variations and technical exercises using patterns you’d like to get better at.

Sing melodies and play what you sing.

I occurs to me, as I scramble through some tough rhythms for Tom Sawyer, that the process for sight reading is different from non-sight-reading in a key way. That is, when I read a piece that I already know, I can hear it in my head ahead of time, but that is not always the case with sight reading. With sight reading it may make sense as the notes are sounding, but you may not always have time to get the sound in your mind ahead of time.

(Is it like flying a plane by radar versus the normal way? I always wondered if pilots hate having to land by radar.)

If sight reading is tough (I haven’t aways been too great at it myself) I recommend actually tapping your foot or your toe, and actually thinking the beats in your head (actually thinking 1, 2, 3, 4). A favorite joke of mine is that musicians can only count to 4. If the music is in 6 that’s just 3 plus 3…

Users of the Kun shoulder rests might have noticed the following problem as the shoulder rests get older– they can get droopy. They are designed so that you can adjust the angle between the plastic “feet” which grip the instrument and the padded part that fits your shoulder. This way you can adjust the rest to fit the slope of your shoulder and also accommodate how high you want to hold the scroll. In any case, the plastic part that pivots this angle loses its hold over time and then tends to slump the instrument in the direction of the floor. I’ll have to make some cartoons to make this all clear. While practicing today, I remembered I had some Krazy glue lying around, so I’ve crazy glued mine to the angle I want (which is entirely opposite of the way it slumps). I will let you know in this entry or a new entry of any potential pitfalls of this approach, but it worked perfectly because the crazy glue pen is small enough to put glue in the little space between the plastic parts. Is it nerdy to get excited about this solution? Well, anyone out there with the “old Kun” problem…now you can do the same.

It occurs to me to make a note that there are some models of shoulder rest that are pretty similar dimensions to the Kun but with sturdier hardware, so the same problem may be avoided by buying one of those instead. When I tried those though, they didn’t sound as good as the Kun (there is a subtle difference in the sound you get with different shoulder rests) perhaps because of the very fact that it is sturdier.