Every week I send out emails where I break down the mistakes that are stalling your progress on the double bass. They're so obvious they sound silly, but they're so common you might be making them every single day — without knowing it.
The Most Common Mistake When Learning Vibrato on the Double Bass
“My vibrato comes out fine, but when I try to sustain it my hand gets tense, rigid.”
It’s happened to all of us, my friend, don’t worry.
In fact, I have a colleague who has spent years studying technique, vibrato specifically: he’s a collector of YouTube videos.
There’s a lot of information on that platform, and that’s good and not so good, huh? Even though you could find everything you need there to learn on your own, trying to organize the content so it fits your specific problem can take you a huge amount of time.
Anyway, this colleague has tons of information and exercises, and lots of time practicing them, but he doesn’t see progress. Well, he does: he can vibrate now, but his hand goes rigid when he tries to connect phrases.
In other words, after several bars of vibrato the tension shows up and his vibrato gets nervous.
So nervous that he reaches a point where he can’t go on. He freezes.
The reason those exercises don’t work for him isn’t that they’re bad. Like I said, there’s a ton of good information on that platform, great teachers giving great advice, but… they’re not watching you. Maybe that exercise just isn’t for you.
In my colleague’s case, his problem comes from the foundation: how he positions himself with the instrument.
Your body is the support. If you forget that, you end up squeezing with your thumb.
Now then, I’m here to remind you about technique, because it’s the easiest thing to forget when you’re focused on vibrato.
It’s actually a chain:
- Basically, letting the double bass come to us, not the other way around. Which leads me to…
- The biggest support we have with the instrument is our body: the leg, the hip, if we play standing. For this and only for this, I have to be honest and admit that (even though I don’t like it) it’s easier sitting down. And this leads us to…
- Don’t squeeze with your thumb: it’s just a small support.
This is the key to avoiding tension in the hand (and therefore in the vibrato).
And when we think we have to keep the same vibrato all the way to the end, it’s harder to play relaxed. The body takes it as a mechanical, repetitive movement, and we end up sounding robotic. The trick is to focus on something else. But I’ll tell you about that in the next email.
Emilse
P.S. Not on my newsletter yet? Sign up here. It’s free to get in, and just as free to get out.
P.S. 2: When you sign up you get a welcome email with a video. It’s an exercise where I explain one concept that’s going to change the way you produce sound. The video runs 4:04 and you almost certainly know the exercise — there isn’t a bass player alive who hasn’t practiced it. But 90% do it wrong, HA! Hardly anyone knows where that movement actually comes from. You won’t be in that 90% though. Not you. Not after you watch the video. You’ll have to let me know.