| Videos-- I decided to add some videos to the site because I thought they might be useful for those of you who have found the written descriptions hard to follow, or just want to see what I'm talking about. I tried hard to provide thorough and clear descriptions, but they'll never replace just seeing something, and videos are, frankly, easier to put up than organizing a bunch of pictures (and better for you, I think). Unfortunately the videos are quite small so that they'll be easily downloaded on a dial-up connection, and so that they don't eat up too much of my somewhat limited space on this free site. As usual, if you have any requests please send them along. |
| If you have trouble watching the videos online, or want to have them for future reference, feel free to download them. To do this, right click on the link and select "save target as..." which will open up a window for you to choose where to save the file. |
| With each video, I'll write a very brief summary of what the video shows and the most important things of note, including any specific things you might want to watch for. ------------------------------ |
 |
| [Low A to E with G gracenote] This is demonstrating (in slow motion) how to play a G gracenote (though the principle applies to any gracenote). Key points: *Going "up" the scale, lift the gracenote finger (the index finger here) at the same time, or slightly before the note you will end on (E here). *Going "down," lift the gracenote finger, and lower it at the same time, or slightly after the finger(s) you're leaving (the ring finger here). These points will help eliminate the low A crossing sound. |
| >Crossing Sounds |
| [D to E] >Bad crossings--Here, I am closing fingers before opening the destination fingers, creating Low G/Low A crossing sounds. Played slow and fast. >Good crossings (slow)--Here I demonstrate an extremely slow version of the same crossing, exaggerating lifting the destination finger(s) before closing. Key: a subtle crossing sound can be heard here because the note is off-key when extra fingers are opened. This is preferable to the alternative sound, and goes away or becomes inaudible when you move up to normal speed. >Good crossings (normal speed)--Note that you can no longer really hear the off-key crossing sound from the slow version. |
| >Throw on D (Hopefully coming soon--I'm having a bit of technical trouble getting a good video clip. It seems my framerate is a little low for anything but slow movements) |