I am finally seeing visible progress in terms of finger strength and endurance with the double bass. I picked up a copy of Tao of Bass a few weeks ago and printed out the first few exercises to add to my daily practice routine, which more or less resembles the following:
- Warmup and endurance exercises from Tao (10 to 15 minutes)
- Scales (10 minutes)
- Arco drills from Bow works (10 minutes)
- Simandl's Bb study (10 minutes)
- Currently working on slurs (5 minutes)
which adds up to around 45 to 50 minutes of practice with the bow. I take a small break in between each segment, and maybe a longer break before I do another 20 minutes of pizz work (arpeggios right now). This is a significant jump from barely being able to maintain 20 to 30 minutes previously in January and mid February, and I can get a much better sound on the E string now.
Starting the first few exercises on the Tao book was daunting - my fingers were crying each time I was done. Now I can actually do them with a metronome. I'm really excited with each exercise I "conquer", because it gives me a much needed improvement in endurance for the rest of the work I'm tackling.
I'm still working a lot on my shifting and intonation, but I managed to memorize 8 arpeggios for pizz this month, with 4 more to go and I've got all 12 keys covered. Betting on getting into a really good checkpoint (as far as beginners go, and this is my 3rd month in) before my vacation in Zurich in May, where I will be taking lessons with a teacher there daily and hopefully get more progress in!