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 YouTube video collector.

There’s a lot of information on that platform, and that’s good and not so good, heh? 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 a long 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.

I mean, after several bars of vibrato the tension shows up and his vibrato gets nervous.

So nervous that it reaches a point where he can’t keep going. 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 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 this, you end up squeezing with your thumb.

Now, I’m here to remind you of the technique, because it’s the easiest thing to forget when you’re focused on vibrato.

It’s actually a chain:

• Basically, let the double bass come to us, not the other way around. Which brings 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) sitting is easier. And that brings us to…
• Don’t squeeze with the 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 understands 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.

Un abrazo,
Emilse