Mapping Double Stops

So, when I was practicing one day, I noticed something that turned out to be very important to my playing and teaching.

You see, I had to play an A, G, C sharp fast and of course cleanly, but as we all know, to be clean, the left hand fingers need to arrive at least at the same time as the bow, if not before.

This made me think about how I might get my fingers positioned to do this, and that was the start of my breakthrough.

I mean, what if I put the three fingers down on all three strings at the same time, even though I would be playing them one at a time? Wouldn't this mean that the passage would be clean, at least from the standpoint of my fingers being in place before I bowed them? Well, this was a good observation, but I noticed something else as well.

If I placed the pattern of the three fingers made over three strings on one string, I could clearly see that the pattern was whole step and then half step.

In other words, I had just contracted a three string pattern onto one string.

I was fascinated as this made it very clear what pattern I was aiming for.

Thinking about it from that point of view led me to organize double stops differently, and using my fingering board, this allowed me to see it all even more distinctly.

So with this new strategy in mind, I decided to look at sixths.

Rather than thinking of the distance, say from A to F sharp, as a major sixth or four and a half whole steps, I brought my second finger back over to the G string and it suddenly just became a whole step.

From that moment on, rather than thinking of a major or minor sixth, I simply called them whole and half steps, with a major sixth being a whole step and a minor sixth being a half step.

The simplicity of this kind of thinking totally changed my perspective.

Okay then, but would this new way of seeing things work with thirds? Personally I had such trouble with thirds as the finger placement seemed so arbitrary.

But when I looked at them as I had with sixths, things changed.

So I put everything on one string, and as I did with the arpeggios in the last video, I put in the in -between note, as you can see on my fingering board.

What I saw then was that it was a whole step, half step for a major third, and a whole step whole step for a minor third.

So by putting my first finger back to the other string and keeping my second finger in place, I could now see what was going on.

It was equally true when I kept my third finger in place between my second and fourth fingers.

Thinking this way opened my eyes to something else.

When I started a scale in first position with say G on the D string and B on the A string and just went up the strings, a sequence came to light.

Calling the starting position a half step meant going up became half, whole, whole, half, half, whole, whole, half.

Unbelievably this created a major scale in thirds.

Not only did this work with thirds, but with sixths as well.

So this is all good.

But what about octaves? Well, for a long time I figured that doing a whole step, whole step, half step pattern on say the A string was the way to go. You see, once my fingers were on the string, I then moved my fourth finger to the E string and then I raised my second and third fingers. What was left? My octave.

Later though I found that using a whole step, half step, whole step pattern was a better fit for my hand.

You see, when I held my left hand up to look at it, the pattern I saw was whole step, half step, whole step.

So I decided to use this as my model for octaves as it seemed more natural to my hand.

But I'm curious.

What do you see when you look at your left hand? Well anyway, perhaps this all sounds a bit crazy.

But I mean, locating distances on the fingerboard can be a huge undertaking.

I liken it to trying to locate a small boat in the ocean from the shore.

I mean, trying to put your fingers in the same spot over and over and over again on that huge fingerboard can become a daunting adventure.

Well, mapping in this way opened the door for me as no longer did I feel like I was just guessing about where to put my fingers.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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