How to Play Tricky Shifts on the Double Bass

Hi, it's Geoff Chalmers here from discoverdoublebass.com. That's the home of online video double base lessons. If you like to learn more about the instrument, go and check out the website after this video. Today, I'm going to be showing you how to troubleshoot awkward shifts on the double bass. You know what I mean if you play this instrument for more than just a few minutes. When you start to move around, it can get awkward and uncomfortable and your tuning suffers as you go from note to note. This lesson was prompted by a question that I have from Brad who is a member of the Discover Double Bass study group. He was asking me about playing D-flat and D major seventh arpeggios and shifting from the note A to the note C sharp, and how to do that consistently. The method that I showed him to practice that can be applied to, well, any music, any passages that you apply. I'll show you how that works, answer Brad's question specifically, and teach you the technique. Let's get into it. Okay. When you're practicing shifting, it's always a good idea to use the bow so you can really hear what the issues are. The problem that Brad was describing was he was playing a D arpeggio, so D, F-sharp, A, and it was a major seventh one so there's a C-sharp, and a D on the top. When you're playing this arpeggio, if you're gonna make a mistake, and you get the first, say if you the F-sharp by, you know the A is gonna be right if you are using a good hand shape. It's this shift here up to the C-sharp, that's the danger zone. Once you've got the C-sharp, the D is no problem at all. You could, of course, use different fingering. You could play the A here, and play it that way. The reality is this, that when we playing music, we don't have the chance to arrange everything perfectly and choose the fingering that's just right, and it's gonna reduce the shifts. There are times that you'll have to make that shift. You really need to learn how to do it. There is times that you'll want to maybe add a little glissando. It's absolutely impossible to think I'm only ever gonna do D major, up to D string. It's just not something that…I mean you could also play it well a number of different ways, but that's not gonna help you long term. The way that we troubleshoot this is that we actually think about the scale, we identify the shift. The problem happens going from A to the C-sharp.