on the skin

Which is the most important body part in playing the double bass?

Is it the shoulder, the elbow, maybe the hand? Or we could think more in the abstract - Daniel Barenboim talks about the head, the heart, and the gut, three principal and equal contributors.

I'm going to suggest something a little more superficial, though: the skin. It's our largest organ, also our most prominent, most often injured, and quickest to heal. We constantly stretch it, squeeze it, splay it, poke it, pluck it - we ask it to be firm, soft, callused, flexible, tough, fleshy, sensitive. Amazingly, it will usually do all these things, without us taking much notice until it cracks, chafes, burns or blisters.

Within the skin are nerve fibers, which create our sense of touch. These nerves provide our most important sensory input while playing; even more than our ears, they allow us to micro-adjust and play in tune. By the time our ears have heard a note played out of tune, everyone else's ears have heard it too - so we depend on our skin to correct it quicker.

A cellist friend recently cut her left middle finger at the knuckle, rather severely - she had to get eight stitches. She's recovering well, but it's still been frustrating for her to play with injured skin. For a while she couldn't flex the finger enough, and then that finger's vibrato didn't seem to work. For something superficial, the skin can have a deep impact.

One bass maker once told me that the reason strings take a while to break in - and sound so much better after a few weeks of playing - is that skin cells and oils fill in the string's gaps, softening and warming the edges of its vibration. So skin becomes an essential part of the instrument, as well as our own bodies. We leave little pieces of our skin all over the place - as gross as that might seem.

I haven't read too much about the skin, and I can't remember any teacher coaching me on proper skin care. But I've definitely been paying more attention to it since I moved to Calgary. The climate is very dry, which can cause our skin (as well as our basses) to tighten and crack. The best solution to the problem seems to be a good humidifier, and some well-insulated gloves.

hanging elbows

My fellow bassist and blogger Stan Haskins wrote a post titled "Tipping the bucket" in response to my post about carrying angle, "buckets of physiological fun." Stan covers all sorts of technique and pedagogical issues on his blog glued to the string, and he's a careful observer of what bassists do, as well as what they say they're doing. They're not always the same.

For example, I wrote that "there's a continuous need to get the elbow onto or above the plane of the string - our elbows tend to dangle down below," as though that were a rule: dangly elbow = bad bass playing. There's also a case to be made for keeping the elbow lower, though:

The lower the upper arm, that is, the lower the elbow, the less energy is necessary to hold it. At the same time there is an increase in the energy that the biceps must provide to maintain the angle at the elbow. Since the forearm weighs less than the entire arm, less energy is necessary at a low-elbow position than at a high one.

- Gerhard Mantel, Cello Technique: Principles and Forms of Movement, p. 170-1

Less energy means more efficient, which means better playing, right? Well, not necessarily. Mantel suggests an experiment using a letter scale:

Take up the bow and put the tip on the scale. Now press on the scale as hard as possible, once with a low elbow, once with a high elbow. With the elbow low the scale will register about half what it will with the elbow high. Thus we can deduce:

An increase in dynamics requires an appropriately higher elbow position.

- p. 171

Mantel's experiment doesn't account for many of the factors in bow position, but it does lead to a basic understanding of the physics involved. For louder dynamics, and particularly for playing loudly at the tip, a higher elbow will tend to be more powerful; at softer dynamics, and when playing towards the frog, a lower elbow will tend to be more efficient. I recorded a video of myself playing an excerpt from Mendelssohn 3 to try and gauge where the right elbow goes:



And there are certainly moments when it goes "submarine", and others when it lifts. Not that my playing is the authoritative example of right elbow usage! What I especially wanted to stress in my original post was to not settle for one answer; observe lots of bass players, and other string players as well. The basic principles of shoulder, elbow and hand movement are surprisingly similar across all the string instruments, and even for German bow players.

Mantel adds another point that I wanted to stress in my post:

One final warning: So far we have assumed that the shoulder is a pivot point that is steady, whereas in fact it can make rather big circular movements. It can be pushed forward, up, and back. If the shoulder is habitually raised, unnecessary muscle activity will result, which may hinder the control of small motor impulses in the entire right arm. A raised shoulder is also a visual expression of insecurity and should be avoided.

- p. 172

So while there may be no rule on lifting the elbow, there's an essential one on lifting the shoulder: don't do it! I have to continuously watch out for that in my own playing, and it sounds as though Stan does as well - he emphasizes keeping the shoulder in a relaxed position.

buckets of physiological fun

This post is part of my occasional series on playing the double bass using a human body. Okay, very occasional. You can read the other post here if you like.

One of the odd things about the human body is that it didn't evolve primarily in order to play the double bass. Our body structures were produced by adaptations to pressures and demands having little to do with double bass playing. Demands such as - carrying buckets.

That's right, there seems to have been quite a lot of bucket-carrying in our evolutionary past, and we have the elbows to prove it:

Carrying angle -

When the arm is extended, with the palm facing forward or up, the bones of the humerus and forearm are not perfectly aligned. The deviation from a straight line (generally on the order of 5-10°) occurs in the direction of the thumb, and is referred to as the carrying angle (visible in the right half of the picture, right). In females the carrying angle is greater than in males.^[1]

The carrying angle can influence how objects are held by individuals - those with a more extreme carrying angle may be more likely to supinate the forearm when holding objects in the hand to keep the elbow closer to the body.

- extracted from a Wikipedia article about the elbow

You can see your own carrying angle if you stand in front of a mirror and externally rotate (supinate) your shoulder until your palm faces forward. It's different for every person, though as the Wikipedia article notes, it tends to be greater for women - since women's hips are wider, they need more clearance for those buckets. It will also tend to be larger on your dominant side, meaning most of us are right-arm bucket-carriers.

Of what importance is this to the inquiring bass player, besides a new and hopeless pickup line ("Hey baby, what's your carrying angle?") At least for German-bow players, there's a continuous need to get the elbow onto or above the plane of the string - our elbows tend to dangle down below, accommodating our carrying angles but compromising the weight and support of our bow arms.

In order to correct for the carrying angle, we tend to lift our elbows and rotate the arm inward - pronating the bow into the instrument. If you use the larger muscles of the back and shoulder to do this, by lifting and compressing the shoulder forward, you'll also compromise the structure of the arm. Which will also disrupt the transfer of weight to the string, and possibly cause long-term injuries. Damn those bucket-schlepping ancestors!

Somehow we have to find a way to keep the chest open, the shoulder lowered and relaxed, and still create the internal rotation to lift the elbow and transfer the weight into the string. It sounds hopelessly complicated, I know - but when you see it in action, it looks effortlessly graceful, almost like we evolved to do this after all. Next time you watch a great string player, pay attention to how he or she rotates the arm - what happens to the shoulder, is the elbow straight or slightly bent, and can you tell where the pronation or supination are happening? How does this change on the lower and upper strings, through different bowings, articulations, and expressive demands?

And when the concert is over, do they still have the strength left to carry a bucket or two?