Double Bass Location of elbow when bowing

[Andy Mopley]

Hi there

firstly, many thanks to those that have answered previous thread, always very helpful.
I have a question now around how to best correct a habit I have developed, and that is that I tend to tuck my (German bowing) elbow close to my hip when I play. My teacher prefers it be almost "hanging from a string" so to speak, suspended in the air, somewhat well clear of my hips - like this

Tucking the elbow also makes me bow the strings closer to the fingerboard, something I'd like to think I should be able to do when the music requires me to do so and not be default because of a bad habit.
I play standing.

Suggestions welcomed.

Thanks for reading!

 

[MikeCanada]

Playing in front of a mirror or taking video of your playing in order to catch it and being mindful of your bad habits are good places to start. If I am correctly picturing what you are currently doing, it makes me think that you are not engaging your shoulder and back muscles as much as you could be, and most of the length of your stroke is coming from rotating your elbow. If that is the case, the above video shows how passive your elbow is when you engage the rest of your bow arm. Each bow stroke is initiated in your back, and the rest of the arm follows. This allows for big muscles to do the work instead of smaller ones, and the "relaxed arm" or "arm weight" we often discuss to be used to its full potential. That should give you a few things to assess and to think about when you work on correcting your bad habit.

As far as ways to correct it, spend a few minutes of your practice time focusing exclusively on it. Bow from frog to tip on all of your open strings making sure that your arm is doing what it is supposed to be doing. Then try a few bowing patterns that will get you into different parts of the bow, and then add scales or repertoire. The open strings allows you to focus exclusively on what your bow arm is doing, to get that feeling into your arm and your head. When that is fresh in your mind and you move to something that requires more of your attention to be elsewhere, that feeling should still be prominent in your subconscious. I think video (almost every camera or phone is capable of it now) is a great thing too as you can see if you are becoming more consistent with it, or if you return to bad habits when you are not actively thinking about it. Even with the audio quality of a phone camera, you should be hearing positive results as well.

 

[Andy Mopley]

Mike - THANK YOU Your advice on correcting it appears to have worked almost instantly*, really appreciate you taking the time to respond! I have a copy of the Secvick exercise for double bass, I'll be using this to practice correcting my technique. Thanks again, though, it helped a lot.

* I know this because I am "feeling" the shoulder after a few minutes and post practice, not pain, just a workout.

The other thing that has happened is that bowing from the shoulder also makes it easier to control where I'm bowing (in relation to fingerboard) whereas before I kept on wondering if the bass was set at the right height.