I've been spending the last couple of days with the first book of Patrick Neher's ColorPoz method. I've been studying with Patrick the last few years, and he dropped off a copy of the books for me on Monday.
I'm still only a few exercises in and I haven't had a chance to play any of it for Patrick yet, but I've found a bunch of things on my own to work on just in those first three exercises. The early ones focus on placing short motifs in multiple positions on the bass in close succession, so you have to shift to get there but you can easily use your ear to check if the pitches in first position match those in third. At the same time, I am doing a lot of listening for differences in tone color in the different parts of the bass, and learning to even them where I can, and love the differences where I can't.
Another thing I've been working on with them is bow placement. I have a bad habit of generally bowing too close to the fingerboard, but on top of that, I think I under-adjust bow position as my left hand moves higher and lower. These exercises jump around quite a bit, so it's been good to focus on getting the right bow placement for every left hand move. Also with the bow, many of the motifs involve string crossings, so I'm thinking a lot about angle, weight, and placement of my right elbow as I bring the bow across the strings.
That's a lot of areas to focus on in just a few short pages, but then again, I have a lot of work to do on my playing. Anyway, I hadn't seen the books mentioned many places yet and figured I'd point them out in case anyone was interested. I think for many people the books will make a great exercise especially for the left hand, but I'm particularly weak with my right so basically everything these days is either an exercise for my right hand or it goes to the bottom of the pile.
I'm still only a few exercises in and I haven't had a chance to play any of it for Patrick yet, but I've found a bunch of things on my own to work on just in those first three exercises. The early ones focus on placing short motifs in multiple positions on the bass in close succession, so you have to shift to get there but you can easily use your ear to check if the pitches in first position match those in third. At the same time, I am doing a lot of listening for differences in tone color in the different parts of the bass, and learning to even them where I can, and love the differences where I can't.
Another thing I've been working on with them is bow placement. I have a bad habit of generally bowing too close to the fingerboard, but on top of that, I think I under-adjust bow position as my left hand moves higher and lower. These exercises jump around quite a bit, so it's been good to focus on getting the right bow placement for every left hand move. Also with the bow, many of the motifs involve string crossings, so I'm thinking a lot about angle, weight, and placement of my right elbow as I bring the bow across the strings.
That's a lot of areas to focus on in just a few short pages, but then again, I have a lot of work to do on my playing. Anyway, I hadn't seen the books mentioned many places yet and figured I'd point them out in case anyone was interested. I think for many people the books will make a great exercise especially for the left hand, but I'm particularly weak with my right so basically everything these days is either an exercise for my right hand or it goes to the bottom of the pile.
