Slow and steady....

I've been practising the bow for a couple of weeks now, and can semi-reliably produce a sound that is "ok" if I'm on one note. Finding where the others are...jeezo. I've been up and down the D scale like nobody's business and starting to feel normal. I know when I'm not in tune and then there's the whole find the note thing - I need to learn vibrato soon as I'm sure that covers a multitude of sins.

So, worked on the bowing - mostly right-angle to the string and mostly getting a nice sound, or at least I think so. Enough that I FaceTime called my ma again just so that I could play her a D scale (crikey, didn't realise that her approval meant so much - invite Freud to chat about mother and daughter relations). Taking the time to find where you place fingers and how that interacts with the bow etc. is the crucial thing. It seems and feels like awfully slow progress which is frustrating sometimes but at other points I quite like the repetition. I guess that those aspects of repetition are the things that embed the basics that will allow me, eventually to play a tune or two.

Using my now near mediocre grasp of the D scale I started my first tune - good old Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Again, as soon as something new is introduced the other things that I was beginning to be confident around slip - the way that I hold the neck of the fiddle and place my fingers for one. My grip becomes skeletor-like.

So I've been working on trying to keep my left wrist relaxed while finding the notes and keeping the bow perpendicular, and while it's not perfect there is definite progress.

Videoing myself, while buttock-clenchingly embarrassing, also provides a fantastic opportunity for feedback. Being able to review and spot where things are working well and what I need to work on next is very helpful. Thinking about his made reflect again on what a feedback loop looks like in CLPL, and how this might be received. The power dynamic around learning and professional development is interesting. Vulnerability and trust are important, because to learn something we need to be somewhere where we are safe to get things wrong. When designing CLPL and thinking about the feedback loop making this aspect explicit might be useful. While it might not be possible to remove the potential discomfort of learning something new, naming and explaining it may go someway towards removing it as a barrier to implementation.

What I spared you from were the videos where I started to try a slightly more difficult tune. Everything went wrong from the bowing to my position to the wrist and the sound became a horror film soundtrack rather than anything resembling a tune. It was quite sobering just how quickly all of the aspects I'd been working on disappeared entirely. The learning I took from that? Don't run before you can walk.