Hi Everyone,

I'll be reposting these exercises from the previous forum here.

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Greg Howard's Tap-Twister #1
Navigating 4ths in the Melody

Practicing scales is a fine way to learn how keys sound and feel, but scales only give you some of the interval and fingering combinations you're going to encounter in real-life situations.

This is the first of a series of exercises designed to help you negotiate an interval whose fingering isn't prescribed by scale fingerings, the 4th.

These exercises are called Tap-TwistersTM, like toungue-twisters for your fingers. Practicing them will make you more limber and help you more easily figure out how to finger melodies as you read them or work out arrangements.

Pay close attention to the fingerings, they are the whole point of this exercise. for the bass part, start off by playing the low C as a whole note at the beginning of each measure, them play half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, etc. After you're comfortable with those, play the part as written. It's written with tied 8ths rather than dotted quarter notes to make it easier to read.


higher-res picture here: http://www.stick.com/sticknews/archives/291/tap-twister1large.jpg

For those of you unfamiliar with StaffTab, the round note-head shape tells you to play with the first finger, the diamond is for the second and the triangle is for the third.

This chart is written for the Baritone Melody 10-string tuning. The numbers above the top staff tell you which fret to play the note at, and the markers on the staff tell you which string to play the note on. If you have a 10-String Classic instrument, just move the melody down one string, and if you have a Matched Reciprocal instrument, move everything down three frets, but play in on the same string as written.

Happy Tapping,
Greg

Tap-Twisters is a trademark of Greg Howard
StaffTab is a trademark of Greg howard and Stick Enterprises, Inc.

Thanks for the exercise. Now for three (unrelated) questions.

First, have you looked at the Hanon keyboard exercises? They use both a combination of intervals as they go up the keyboard. I'd expect that they would also work well moving up the fretboard.

Second, does StaffTab have a symbol for the fourth finger?

Third, do the clefs have any significance? Or are the lines really just equivalent to the strings, as I suspect?

Hi Frederik,

You're welcome. Here are the answers to your questions.

1. I haven't looked at those, but I see them mentioned often, so maybe I should check them out.

2. A square is used for the 4th finger (I normally don't use the 4th finger on the right hand, but do often on the left hand).

3. The clefs are the same as a Grand Staff for piano, but everything is written an octave higher than "actual pitch" as it would be written for piano. This convention is really helpful for both staves, as it reduces the need for ledger lines below the staff. So the position of the noteheads is as it would be reading for guitar or bass.

I hope that answers your questions.

I believe the Hanon exercises were designed to train pianists to use a certain fingering for scalar material in each key, this having to do with the keyboard's layout.

How one plays scalar material on the Stick, however, depends on the piece, and not on the key. Without the piano fingerings, useless to us, Hanon is just a list of major and minor scales in every key.

It may be beneath your playing level, but to anyone interested in reading music on the Stick, I recommend Bartok's Mikrokosmos Books 1 and 2 as the best beginner's introduction to two-handed textures. It's brilliant.

Hanon is divided up into three parts. Part 2 has to do with all the different scales, as noted above, and probably wouldn't apply to the Stick in a useful fashion. However, Part 1 isn't. Instead, it works as follows:

Exercise 1:

C, E, F, G, A, G, F, E, D, F, G, A, B, A, G, F, E ect for two octaves up, then coming back down. The different intervals would probably work even better on a fretboard than a keyboard.

Exercise 2:

C, E, A, G, F, E, F, G, D, F, B, A, G, F, G, A, E etc for two octaves up, then coming back down.

To make it more interesting, both the left hand and the right hand play the same notes, but the fingerings are not always mirror images of each other, since the fingers don't quite work the same. Given the inverted fifths of the Stick, this might not work as well. But I can imagine interesting variations.

If I remember correctly, there are 20 different patterns in Part 1.

Part 2 (if I remember correctly) is all the scales.

Part 3 (again, if my faulty memory isn't failing me) are pianistic technics, like tremalo chords, etc. Some of these may also work on Stick, but it would take more work.

Theoretically, a pianist who used Hanon would start out their daily practices by going through the entire book at the beginning of each day's practice. This would kill about an hour a day, without actually playing any music.

So when I'm talking about adapting Hanon to the Stick, I really mean Part 1 of the Hanon exercises. (And if you want to save money, you can usually buy the three parts separately.)

The Wikipedia article on The Virtuoso Pianist can be found here.

You may be able to download Part 1 from Sheet Music Archives (although I haven't been successful at this).

I forgot to mention Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, here's more info:

http://www.amazon.com/Thesaurus-Scales- ... 082561449X

The one page of Slonimsky that I was able to view looked useful, too. However, if Greg adapts those excercises to the Stick, he may have copyright issues. I'm pretty sure that Hanon is public domain.

(I won't mention that Slonimsky looks more difficult, too. Just because I'm a wimp doesn't mean that everyone is a wimp.)

Hi Frederik,

Given the choice between writing my own exercises and adapting those that were written for another instrument, I think I would choose the first option.

More to come.