Loosen Your Wrist 🎻

So we have another bonus tip video for you here in the Tune Library.

And this one is inspired by a friend of mine who was staying here with me last week.

And he plays bodhrán And my partner was also over, and so he was.

He's kind of an aspiring bodhrán player, took it in classes at University of Limerick.

And so he kind of got a little mini bodhrán lesson the morning of before my friend left for his next leg of the trip.

And it's always fun when you are listening to other instrumentalists teach, because sometimes you can get some really good parallels that also apply to the fiddle.

And that was the case for, this tip.

So what was happening was my partner, Bear really wanted to know, like, how, how can I get, like, a looser, wrist or, how can I just loosen up my.

My, tipper hand here for the drum?

And I have a lot of people who ask me about how can I play with that, really loose, relaxed wrist that you play with?

Now, one little caveat when it comes to the fiddle is that you can either play with a really loose wrist or you can have a very straight wrist and just have, like, more looser fingers.

So it's a little bit more of that movement is coming from the fingers themselves.

Personally, mine is more from the wrist, and I think it's also a lot because I hold the bow up higher than the classical bow hold.

But you'll see people of all, levels, and you'll see multiple different professional players who, some of them who have very straight wrists, like Andrew Finn Magill has a very, very straight, smooth wrist, but incredible flexibility in the hand to get that more fluid sound.

And then there's also people that are like me and they have a super floppy wrist when they play.

So, basically what my friend taught was that if you are too tense, if you're like holding the stick, so you could practice this with like a pencil, if you're just holding it really tight and it's just almost gripping right here, you really can't move your wrist.

Like, there's no relaxation here.

So you really have to, like, you have to hold the bow, of course, because you don't want to drop the bow, but you're really not putting much.

Like, you could probably take this pencil right out of my hand if we were in the same room.

all I'm doing is holding it up.

So it's a very light grip.

hardly any pressure at all.

And that allows my wrist to do more like this.

Bewley is here to assist with this Tutorial.

So, my fellow left handed people will enjoy this.

Left handed, but always right.

Oh, hi.

My, my mom got me a bunch of left handed pencils for Christmas one year and clearly I've spent much time using them so they make great props for this exercise.

So if you'll just excuse the four legged intrusion there, what you can do is there's multiple stages you could do for practicing this loose wrist tip.

So one thing is just, you know, kind of get used to how that feels.

Just to kind of, you know, maybe toss something away.

Nice, and loose.

He's gonna come up again.

so something like that where you know, just letting go any tension, just kind of tossing and then you can shake it back and forth, you know, nice and nice loose wrist.

of course you know your body the best, so don't do anything that's gonna cause intense pain.

this should not be a painful exercise.

So if this is not for you, then maybe try something more with the fingers, which you could also use the pencil for.

But yeah, next stage would be to just take any pencil and go like this.

I'm leaving that in no time to edit.

So just to get kind of that motion of that loose wrist where you're not really, you know, holding something that you don't mind dropping on the floor as opposed to a nice expensive bow, you take a pencil, and yeah, just have that motion.

Next level would be to maybe, you can do all sorts of bowing exercises with this would be to actually take the bow and practice.

It's a little bit heavier than a pencil.

And then practice that same motion to make sure I don't hit anything.

And this is not really how you would bow.

Like this motion right here, it's like that would be way too wavy.

But again, just to kind of get that idea with the wrist.

And then you can kind of start to, you know, it might help to actually get the fiddle up at this point.

And then you can kind of use that as a brace.

And then you can play really long notes.

So nice and slow, just letting that wrist move up.

I call this the cat licking paw motion, which is appropriate because he's coming back again.

and then pushing the wrist almost outwards that way.

So I'll give you a couple different angles that All right.

And then, so then you can play at different speeds.

You can play shorter notes and so on, so forth.

You can keep speeding it up.

So I do kind of feel it a little bit more like my hands moving.

So kind of like what we were tossing away.

So it's less of like just this wrist bending back and forth because that's not really going to translate when you actually put the fiddle to the string, but more of like just kind of that top tossing feeling right there.

So a couple of different stages.

The whole general point is that you don't want this to be too tense because if this muscle is tense then this can't be really relaxed.

So that is the general tip is to play with a nice relaxed right hand or left hand if you're a left handed fiddler.

And yeah, just you know, take, take the different phases of this of this tip.

So you can you know, start with just the hand, a pencil or some similar object and then actually putting to the string from there.

it is very it's a very simple tip as far as tips go.

But we all know that simple doesn't always mean easy.

So lots of different phases to go into this.

hope you enjoyed the interruption from Bewley here.

and then hope you enjoy the tip.

Let me know if you have any questions and I'll see you in the next video.