Dear Friends,
Hi, I'm the one who interviewed Rabbath for the Art of the Bow DVD mentioned earlier in this post. When he was speaking about taking several large breathes it was to help control the nerves when there is an overabundance of adreneline, not about playing faster. "By taking large breathes you become drunk with oxygen" is Francois' way of saying that by hyperventilating you are concentrating on your breathing and not your nerves. He then says to go to the stage right away and begin playing. In this way you are still focused on your breath and then your conscious awareness of adreneline comes more slowly as you come out of a light headed state and you tend to be less overwhelmed by the nerves. He also says that when you have a great deal of adreneline that the perception of time changes since you are hyper-aware of what is happening, so that seconds seem like minutes. His point is that if you are able to take advantage of this feeling that you will be able to take more precise control over your performance. This will not necessarily enable you to play 'faster' but to become more aware of what you are doing. He also says in the interview that adreneline can help you to do things that are seemingly impossible (stories of his brother jumping a very far distance when being scared by an oncoming car - an act he could not repeat under normal circumstances). In this way adreneline is very powerful and may help you to perform beyond your current technical abilities.
Regarding what Francois has said about developing speed - it is endurance that is the key. If you develop such endurance that you do not feel the string under your hand and that you are completely comfortable at any place on the fingerboard, then speed will come. Something I tell my own students at the university is that 'playing fast is nothing but playing slow faster' -- by this I mean that correct smooth even technical command at a slow tempo will allow you to play fast once you have mastered each technical element. I should say that it is more important to develop the correct movements and then develop precision over time. If you are constantly correcting your intonation on the fly, then you will have trouble learning to make each movement more precise and hit the correct place the first time without sliding.
Lastly, to develop great sightreading abilities you need to work like a pianist. Pianists have so many notes and chord shapes to become familiar with that they need to read ahead of where they are actually playing in the music. If you can begin to practice reading a couple of beats of where you are actually playing and then develop the ability to read as much as a bar or even three ahead (short term memory development), then you will become an excellent sightreader. One of the biggest keys to this is to become as familiar as possible with diatonic shapes (scales and arpeggios with a great variety of fingerings in all major and minor keys) -- this way you can begin to recognize larger patterns in the music and not feel you have to concentrate on individual notes.
I hope these bits of advice helps all of you a bit - they certainly have helped me over the years.
Happy New Year,
Hans
Dr. Hans Sturm
Associate Professor of Double Bass
Chair, String Area
Ball State University
President-Elect, International Society of Bassists
hanssturm.com
artofthebow.com
