Below is a method for teaching yourself to play passages of fast/difficult notes more easily. I did not come up with the idea, although I have developed it into this systematic approach.
You will note that I am talking about ‘fast/difficult’ notes. Not all groups of notes that move quickly are necessarily difficult, and not all difficult sequences of notes move quickly. Hence we have the following three categories:
1. Fast notes
2. Difficult notes
3. Fast and difficult notes
Of course, different players find different things difficult. But I believe that, whatever is the case for you, whatever your standard/experience, you will find this approach helpful, and that you can apply it to any difficult/fast music with ease. So, let’s go through the method considering the first category, fast notes. I will then simply give examples for the second and third categories, as the stages to go through are identical.
1. Fast notes
Take this passage of fast notes on the violin, taken from the 1st movement of Beethoven Symphony No.9.
How difficult this is will depend not only (as mentioned above) on your personal skill level but also the speed the conductor has set. It may also depend on the fingering you choose (or is chosen for you!). I will now add a fingering, but I suggest you try out different fingerings to see which you prefer. Anyhow, whatever the difficulties, whatever the fingering, the solution is the same. In each of the stages given below be sure to repeat each stage a number of times until it feels comfortable and sounds well.
a) Play dotted rhythms
Firstly, play the notes in a long-short rhythm, adding slurs, thus:
Play it quite slowly (e.g. quaver = 68). You will immediately notice where/what any difficulties are – in this case it is all about position changing, there are no problems (for example) of string crossing. When you can play it well slowly gradually speed it up (to, say, quaver = 120). You could also experiment by making the slurs longer or shorter. Note that the crucial thing with the slurs is that they join the little note to the bigger following one: don’t do slurs going from the 1st to 2nd notes and so on.
b) Make the dotted rhythms very snappy, thus:
And again, start slow and build up the speed.
c) Play the notes back-dotted (slow to fast):
d) Play them back-dotted and snappy (slow to fast):
e) Finally play them as written
And I think you will find that it has ‘magically’ become easier!
2. Difficult notes
Here’s another passage from The Ninth, just a few bars before the first example. The notes aren’t particularly fast, but they don’t ‘lie under the fingers’ well: principally because the intervals involved aren’t so common. I’ve just given part of the original passage – when you’ve been through it why not check out the whole thing?
And here are the subsequent stages to help learn this passage:
