I’m truly sorry

So I’ve done a lot of whining about how hard thirds are and how they’re going to bite me if anything will, yet I haven’t posted myself playing them.  Unfortunately for all of you, that changes today.

First off, in my defense of the following video, it was filmed again on my laptop (Danielle and I went down and stayed at my parents’ house for a few days and I didn’t want to be without the video camera in case I was playing something particularly well.  Ironically, I left it down there so now I’m stuck up here without it).  The nice thing about my laptop is that the videos get stored directly on here so there’s no extra transfer from my camera.  A convenience that doesn’t really translate to the blog, of course, but it is nice for me all the same.  The bad part is that the sound sucks.  Or it could just be me.

I’ve been practicing the opening to variation 6, which has thirds played on the A and E strings starting really high and then coming down.  The first one is played with the second and fourth fingers, then a shift down for the second one, and then the third is played with the first and third fingers and then the fourth is another shift to the second and fourth fingers again.  That last shift is really tricky and I don’t think I’ve gotten it perfect yet, but I’m getting better.  Here’s the music:

The music here says to play the first third with the third and fourth fingers (which makes a little sense, because it’s a half step for the lower note and a whole step for the higher note, so using 3 4 kind of makes the hand just shift up.  With 2 4, you have to widen the fingers a bit on the shift.  Danielle told me to play 2 4 so that’s what I’m doing).  After the first passage with the thirds, you can see it switches to tenths.  Yeah, not thrilled about that one either (although a violinist at Danielle’s camp said that no one plays the tenths in tune anyway, so not to sweat too much about it).

So here’s the video of these first four thirds coming down and then back up (the back up part isn’t in the piece, I’m just practicing).  Again, like the last video that came from my laptop the sound isn’t great, but it’s all I have and I don’t feel like waiting to get my video camera to post again.  When you listen, it will sound really screechy, which of course could be me, but it doesn’t sound this bad under my ear so I refuse to believe I sound this ungodly awful.  I blame it on the laptop (it’s probably me).  Either way, I’m truly sorry and if you need to turn your sound off then I will understand.  I mostly want you to watch my left hand and empathize with me on how hard thirds are.  Oh, and I’m not trying to play them in tempo, I’m just trying to get the hand mechanics right so forgive me there too.

No, I didn’t go to USC.  Danielle did though – Thornton school of music.

I’m going to keep trucking with these.  Hopefully I’ll have the entire opening passage down soon enough.

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