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Transcript unedited (pop over to the music school for lesson handouts PDF and school ready lesson.

Hello musicians, welcome to the first Suzuki book um for uh viola. So first things first, let's talk quickly about just your positioning of your body. So going to stand with our legs apart um feet slightly at an angle about shoulder width apart. Okay, just bend your knees. Check they're nice and soft. You don't want any rigidity. Okay, we're standing by the way. I mean, you can sit down, of course, but we're assuming that we're standing at the moment. You'll find it actually a bit easier, I find, to stand than to sit, especially if you're doing a lot of practice because and it strengthens your core and all sorts of things. So, now stick the viola under your chin and hold it with your left hand. Cup it if you like between your thumb and your forefinger in that natural arch. And you can hold it um right down by the body of the instrument for now. and just sort of feel its weight and move it up and down a bit and rounded circles. You're going to make friends with this instrument and you're going to enjoy its weight. You're going to be familiar with its um you know its its shape and how it operates within your space, your space bubble. Okay? So you're going to start to understand it if you just hold it with your thumb near the near the body so that you're you've got a line between your sort of thumb and your elbow and your toe and and just feel that weight. That's quite a good thing to do as well. So now support it and tuck your chin in. And what I want you to do is just to try and hold it without the left hand you. So squeezing between your chin, your jaw, the side bit there between your chin and your ear and on the on the rest plate. And if you're using a a shoulder rest, I don't use a shoulder rest, so I'm not too familiar with how you work with those, but I do know it makes the instrument much fatter. I don't know if it makes it easier or harder to support without a hand, but if you take your hand away, that position of the viola is the position that you want to have when you're playing. And the other good thing to do every now and then is is just to support it without a hand to remind yourself that actually when your hand comes up, it doesn't need to grip it really hard cuz your neck and shoulder actually doing a really good job taking some of that um weight because it's quite a heavy thing. Now I'm using an electric cello and it's not plugged in. And the reason I use that for teaching is because I teach an awful lot all day long and the neighbors would you know it wouldn't be very pleasant for other people who um you know who live around me. So you have to be a bit aware of that especially when you're learning I think because you can you know practice the same thing over and over and over again as you're going to find out in a minute. Um so I'm hoping that you've um looked at some pictures and some videos of how to hold the bow. And of course, if you sign up to the music school, you'll be able to see all my video my visualized um diagrams and and directions and things like that. But I'm hoping that you've already done that, guys. And you can do a little practice. Have your bow now and hold it vertically. That's from sky to ground. And just move your fingers up and down the wood of the bow or the carbon depending on what you've got. For information, I use a vegan bow. Um, I've just got used to it. It works really well with a um an electric instrument and you do need quite a lot of rosin on it. That's the only thing because the synthetic strings are quite different. But I've got so used to it now. Um, so we've got our bow already and we're looking at our strings and our fingers and the music and thinking, "Oh, what now?" So, all we're going to do today is familiarize ourselves with the with the open strings and then play this um exercise for proper A string posture. So, if you just get your um your bow and halfway down, let it gently drop onto the Don't know if you can hear that. Drop it gently onto the C string and without forcing anything, just pull it along and so you can hear it. Okay. Now, if I push into it, that's what happens. So, if I just rest and pull, that's what happens. And it's much much nicer. So, that's our C string. Now, if you go to the next string along, we're working down towards our towards the ground, towards our toes. And this string, okay, is the G string. So, we've got C, G, D, and then we've got an A. Now, notice as you're going along those strings, you're you're if you look at the shape of the fingerboard, you'll see it's curved, so it's not flat. So, lots of things have to occur so that you don't hit the wrong string when you're trying to play, say you're trying to play the um the G. If you tilt too far with your bow and bring your elbow down too far, you might hit the other string. So, it's all about the mechanics of this is all about having your elbow in the correct place to play each string and having your bow in the right um sort of it's got to be perpendicular to the string. So, it needs to be at right angles to the string depending on which string you've got. So, there's quite a lot going on actually. But your your um your ear and your mind and your body and your neck and your arms and all of this will come naturally the more you do it. But what you don't want to do is make any early mistakes. Okay? That's really important to get it right first off. So let's have a look. I'm going to play this. I've got a um an iPad in front of me with the music and I can play it and stop it and start it and then I'll go over with my instrument that's not plugged in just to if I want to explain things. Okay. But let's let's have a look at let's have a listen to that first exercise.
Okay. So, what do you notice? They're all the same note. That's the most obvious thing, but they are kind of different. So, there's four of those in quick succession. And then there's two of those in less quick succession and then there's a break. Okay, so that's the first thing. So if you look at that piece of music now, you can sort of start to think, well, how how is that piece of score, that piece of music telling me to play those? So if you look at the four, the group of four and those two thick black lines, that means play them quickly. Okay. And the next one has only got one line. So you play those a little bit longer, but they're still quite detached because of those dots above. Okay. So the the you know the passion that you hear in music is always because of the way the composer has constructed these different things to try and communicate to you how they wanted it to be performed when they wrote it or for teachers to try and explain to you how to follow that sort of code. It's like a code isn't it music. Um, the other thing you can see is this box with just three sides above the first note. Now, that means that we're going to do a down bow. So, it corresponds, if you look at your bow, up the top is a point and down the bottom is a square. So, that corresponds with this square. So, we're going to start in that direction and go down. Okay. Up would be a point. And we'll come across lots of those later on
and so on and so on. So that's fairly straightforward. But the thing is when we look at number two, there's no rest for us to look at. So on number two, we're going to have to do this.
So that's that's basically it. It's not particularly difficult. Let let's just play the second.
Okay. And then it repeats. um you do that in your practice. We're not going to do lots of repeats now. So, the only thing really to think about, if you want to slow it right down, you could do
Okay. And then you can when you get really good, you can speed it up. Okay. And um remember that the
Okay. And so it goes on. Um so that's it for today. That's all we've done. So remember, familiarize yourself if you can please with the strings. Always look in a mirror when you're practicing. And you can check that your elbows in the right place for playing each note. I've got a big huge mirror in front of me. And um just make sure that you know your back's nice and straight. Perhaps you're um you're not um bending. You know what I do a lot? I do it a lot because I wear glasses. I I tend sometimes to lean a bit forward to make sure I can see properly. And it's it's a big mistake. It it actually does affect your playing. Okay guys, back tomorrow.


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