hi channel tellers and mini cellists or big jealous whoever you are welcome to telltale club and we're going to look at oh come little children today from the suzuki book one for cello method um it's in d major and you might be wondering when you look at that music what that's three and that long line is and then look it happens again what does it mean well what it means is keep your third finger down now look interestingly why would you have your third finger down when you're going to play an open a well it doesn't doesn't make any sense well what what we're doing we're giving us a shortcut to success so that we're going to know exactly where we're going when we do that string crossing in the next bar now what i want you to do is play me your d string and a little scale

and come back and stay on the three so open one three four back to three and hold it don't i hope you've got no you're not squeezing are you no squeezing please but just have those three fingers there holding them down you don't don't put them flat because then your open a won't play you can't even touch with a hair not that you should have hairs unless you're a werewolf for your werewolf hairs on the on the palms and the underside of your fingers that would be odd but even if you did have hair and you touched the hair on the a string it would sound funny it wouldn't resonate properly we've got our three fingers down uh nice curved curled fingers and i'm going to play an open a around about um quite near the middle but um to the left of center on our bow and we're going to play a quick a and then another a

okay now you'll notice that one note is longer than the other and what's next we're already there our third finger was there all along down uh sorry up down up down up down up four and only at this point do you lift the three up so that you can play the e you obviously you can't have your third finger down and stop at the wrong note now you've got that third down again a little rest

and up again okay and a little rest now the rest of the piece you don't need to hold that third down you will be playing again uh in bar seven at nine

where obviously you would hold it down because you're playing three of them three f sharps and now you have to lift it up because you're going to play the d and you it's awkward i mean you could hold it down actually

you could hold it down for the entire song but too much holding down is not going to necessarily help you articulate uh this pretty d and when you start to do vibratos it's very hard to do vibrato if not impossible when you're holding fingers down as always remember with shortcuts there's always a cost somewhere okay there's always a cost um i i don't recommend you start vibrato too early but i recommend that you hear them early you know when to expect them it's going to help you later on okay so freeing up your hand allows you to play this rather lovely d and you're going to need um to give it some expression and keeping all your fingers down is it won't allow you to do that so it's very important to know when to hold down and when to let go okay now guess what i think cuddles is going to do a version of this later um uh i'll pop it up um possibly late afternoon we've got school club soon um 3 30-ish uh is school club although you're probably different times all over the world depending on where you're listening so i'm not going to tell you a time but we do we now do school club which is a i tell a silly joke and then you get a tune so um perhaps cuddles will pop um oh come little children on at school club today and also we've got the lunchtime recitals of course that's if you're a grown-up you'll maybe prefer those remember to use your drone darlings i get very upset if you don't use your drone you're going to be a very advanced player when you no longer need a drone okay and even i use a drone when i practice um i can hear my mistakes when they're out of...