I wanted to dig up this thread, maybe it should be a new one, but I want to talk about formal practice of "extended techniques".
For years I have just practiced standard things, Simandl, Petracchi, Rabbath, Billie, standard classical solos and transcriptions, etc.
I worked on my sounds enough to understand them and reasoned that if my traditional chops are up the sounds will take care of themselves.
I still agree with that - I am most interested in the sounds that lie beyond traditional playing which means you need a good handle on that stuff.
Lately, I have really wanted to formally push my control of the sounds themselves. I have come up with some pretty obvious ideas, but it really helps to formalize things:
ex.1 Long tones are long tones, compound harmonics, sub-harmonics, upper partial harmonics, etc. still need to be treated as regular long tones, meaning try to use the whole bow, make the changes as clean as possible and sustain the same tone trying not to allow other harmonics/fundamentals etc. to sound at the bow change or even the beginning of the sound.
I found I had a tendency to use shorter, faster strokes for many of these sounds, getting that under control helped a lot. It is still an option but not a default setting.
Ex. 2 try to push the dynamics of the sound, make the loud ones soft, make the multiphonics scream.
It is pretty incredible how loud you can get some of these things acoustically!
I'd like to keep adding to this list, next I am going to apply these ideas to bowing the tail piece.
