hi it's Geoff Chalmers here from discoverdoublebass.com which is the home
of online video double bass lessons and courses and i'm joined today by one of our tutors the
fantastic Joseph Conyers who's a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra welcome Joe it's great
to have you here happy to be here well we've been uh filming a series of lessons for a course that
you're presenting called Orchestra Chops and within the lessons you mentioned several times
you were describing different bowing articulations um as letters and you were kind of so could you
maybe talk on that subject i just thought it was such a great way of describing these sounds and i
was hoping you might be able to elaborate on that and share it with the folks at home sure so as
we as we prepare as musicians and as we're growing and developing as players what we're trying to
really do is develop our palette our color palette our tone palette but also our our articulation
palette as well and it's very easy to kind of just say i'm gonna play just a certain way and that's
just the way i play a down bow but what kind of downbow is it is a is it a happy down though
is it a sad down though is it a i mean it sounds kind of ridiculous but when we're playing these k
different pieces and the moods of music where you're playing Debussy which is very different or
Brahms or Stravinsky these are all those composers themselves we have to have a wide ray in a large
palette of different colors and sounds to create the effect that those composers won't want so i
i've uh and i don't know where i got this from i don't know if i got this from another teacher
but it's something i've definitely taught in thinking about articulations as letters
so the students who work with me i mean and why yeah so the letters generally match up with the
way you would say that letter or how it starts um uh a word so m for example is a very legato
because you say m m there's no there's no really m there's no articulation in that yeah right
it's just so that's that's very smooth articulation then you might have something
the opposite of that would be like a k which is very hard k it's very um
aggressive and almost like percussive yeah k articulation would be quite hard at the front
whereas a d or b might be slightly warmer than that
and i i hope that makes sense absolutely at the uh and all the things that dictate this are the speed
of that first explosion i can get in that that first explosion at the front of the note the
speed and what happens after you release the bow so when i say explosion that's putting the bow
on the string getting you can see i'm getting string the move a little bit and i can either
actually uh apply quick speed with the bow or if i do it slower
it changes that that that front articulation as we start to develop all these then we
learn when to apply them to certain pieces because like in the Brahms that's covered in the courses
the Brahms one excerpt has sforzandi and then it has staccatos and then it has accents and you
have to know how do we make a difference for all three because in any audition setting the
panel is really going to want to hear the difference between a sforzano and an accent and
a staccato so you're thinking in terms of letters at that point to describe this to your students
and also to understand it yourself I guess yeah in the language you know and it's the easy way when you're when
i'm teaching i can say oh make that more of a k make that more a d there make that oh that could
be more like an m that that should be definitely more more legato i mean and it all depends i mean
all of this is subjective Geoff there's no like there's no guide that says that K sounds like
this and the T sounds like this but hopefully it gives the student an idea of how they can think
about the different types of articulation at the fronts of notes that's appropriate
for the composer at the time in the piece of music well that's fantastic Joseph thank you so much
for sharing that with us and for coming over and filming these lessons it's been a real pleasure
hearing you play and uh yeah spending time with you so thank you for that thanks for watching at
home and if you want to learn more about Joseph follow the links below we'll see you next time