I hope you made good progress with your scales, which are a little dry, I must admit. But they are excellent exercises to improve speed, precision and intonation.
Today we have a look at the remaining part of the scales on one string. Let’s start with the thirds:
This time we have four notes on one bow. Repeat this and go on to the next tempo:
Fingering is identical, of course. Repeat it as desired and play the third version:
If you are happy with this you can add another, even faster variety. But please remember to stick to your metronome.
Now comes the last – and for many of us the most difficult part: The chromatic scale:
In one of the publications available unfortunately the entire fingering was omitted. Therefore I’ve inserted it to show the pattern.
Please remember to shift to the fifth position on the g flat/f sharp. Otherwise you could run into serious intonation problems.
Repeat this as usual and play it faster:
This is much more difficult because we are confronted with this rather seldomly and we haven’t the opportunity to build up adequate routine in everyday life.
Here we have the next tempo:
We have to change the bowing a little bit, so we get three quarter notes on one bow. Otherwise we would end up with an up-bow when we repeat the scale.
This looks like a huge amount of time to be used. But you should have finished the entire A string within ten minutes. After that you could go on to the double stops or take the next string.
Usually we proceed position by position upwards when we play Flesch. We started in the first position, so the next step would be the second position. In our case that would be the G string:
Now go on exactly as you did with the A string.
The next part would be the third position. There is no start in b flat major, so we go on upward – the fourth position:
Use the same pattern as before and go on to the fifth position:
Now this gets really high. Up to the – theoretically – 11th position.
It will take some time, weeks, perhaps even months. But if you keep up your work you’ll improve your technique greatly!
