Bow Strokes: Building Legato into Spiccato

Peter  our first progress video - congratulations! Thanks for sharing this. You're off to a great start.

I believe you could make your stroke more legato still, especially notice when you go from quarters (var 1) to eights (var 2) that the sound becomes somewhat uneven between the up-bows and down-bows. Think about keeping your weight "in the string" (I actually consider my weight to be somewhere between the string and the belly of the bass, similar to visualising a karate-chop that goes past the target); then try to also focus on making both up-bow and down-bow the same length. If you've seen a sound wave in a digital recording program before, imagine making it more "rectangular" shaped instead of "football" shaped (again, Edwin Barker's course on "The French Bow" is fantastic for showing these articulation shapes, and equally applicable to German bow). 

I bet that by focussing on making the sound even, your wrist and arm will react a little differently and allow the glued-to-the-string feel to let your wrist react to the bow changes, and then you can develop the control to let the wrist and fingers really control the bow change more carefully. 

Thanks for sharing this! Looking forward to more!

Mike Brown really great Mike! You've got a good arm setup and you're making a great sound.
My only suggestion to push you further is to work on isolating and refining the wrist and finger action more in the bow changes - right now your wrist is flexible and reacting nicely to your arm changing direction by cushioning the bow change; but you can get the wrist and fingers more involved still! Look around the 11-minute mark of the TWI Video #1 (posted above) and you'll see what I mean - that action can be used on every bow change, especially with things like variation 2, 3, 4 (where you have faster notes it will be more obvious). 

Greetings @Radek and  thanks for sharing your progress here! My main suggestions for you in these exercises:

• use more bow! We don't always need to use the whole bow at all, but in technical exercises like this, it's a good place to experiment and push yourself. So especially in variations 5 - 7 and 16 - 18, make sure you're following those prompts on the exercise page to get right out to the tip of the bow, and back to the frog again after (right now you're staying in the lower half)
• give the #2 video I posted another look, and try practicing this a few time really exaggerating that movement of the wrist and fingers
• In relation to keeping your fingers, wrist, elbow, and shoulder more relaxed, try moving your upper body from your hips in a way that helps you bring weight into the string, especially at the tip - you're staying very static right now, which is not always the most efficient way of transferring weight into the string. I'd check out Ali Kian Yazdanfar's "Sound Production Fundamentals" and Mikyung Sung's "Bassics of Bass" (and particularly the Weight Distribution lesson).

Radek thanks also for this second post! The above ideas apply here as well; but something these staccato strokes really show is how you're using the weight of you arm - in this case you're lifting weight out of the string, then putting it back in to start and stop the string; be very careful not to do this!

Just keep your weight the same (dead weight of your arm) and move the bow left or right, then stop, and go the other way. In other words, you bow is bouncing a lot, and it should not be in these staccato variations. 

Another way to think about it - keep your weight in the string always, like I said in the first instructional video, think of your weight being actually between the string and the top of the instrument. 

Hey Peter nice second video, thanks for sharing this here. These mixed legato-staccato variations are a lot of fun; but they shouldn't necessarily be as easy as you make it seem! What I mean by that is: when you are doing the staccato notes, especially at the tip, I see that you're lifting your weight out of the string and "scooping" the notes. This can be useful sometimes, but in this case, we're looking for absolute control over the string/note the entire time - so you should leave your weight in the string, and the stop between notes should be a "hard stop". 

Another way to think about it: your staccato notes right now are "round" or "pearl"-shaped - for this exercise, in order to train the wrist/finger flexibility and weight transfer, we're looking for a much more "rectangular" sound with a very clear beginning and just as clear end to each note - this requires keeping the weight the same and always in the string, and simply relying on left-or-right motion to make the string speak, and a "hard stop" when it is meant to be silence (like between staccato notes). 

Hope this helps! Happy to discuss this more in the Zoom check-in this evening. 

Radek puky nice improvement from the last ones! Be careful though, most of the time you're not doing the turn at the bottom of the scale pattern correctly, and it's throwing your bow direction off - not a big deal, but worth noting. Also you could be more careful about intonation, especially on your G (III) string, it is consistently quite out of tune there. 

Wrist action is looking better! Too bad you didn't get to the last variations. With the staycation, make sure you're still leaving space between notes, even when the rhythms get faster. 

Nice effort on this!

Radek puky this sounds like a solid path to improvement! Good for you! The Joel exercise book - if you're referring to the tonebase warmup PDF, it can be found here: Basic Warmups and Every Day Exercises for the Bass - Live Calendar - Tonebase Bass Community

If you mean his technique book that contains the complete version of these bowing routines, that's available through the store on his website - look for Canadian School of Double Bass Book 1 (and make sure to take your tuning system, which I believe is 5ths Tuning, so the light-blue coloured book): Store — Joel Quarrington

Mike Brown Excellent Mike! The wrist action looks especially good partway through that first video link. In the second video (20 and 21) it could be more wrist, less arm still - but I see improvement. Keep at this and try to arrive at a point where you can do this without any arm just to challenge yourself and have that option available. And don't forget to apply this action to actual spiccato (up bow and down bow combined!)