The Cello Hand Shift

Hello, my name is Justin Canter, I am a cellist form New York city and today I am going to talk a little bit about shifting. When we are playing a cello, we end up having to move our hand quite a bit from position to position as we call it. When we first start out, we learned everything in this position, first position, which gives a quite a few notes (music playing) and then we do actually a lot with that but eventually, we decide that we want to be able to play something a little higher like here (music playing).

And the way we do it, it is by sliding our hand to the new position so, if we rarely pick it up, if we picked it up, there has to be an open string (music playing).

So, right there I shifted it from first position by lifting my hand to fourth position. But usually what happens when we are shifting is that we have to somehow slide our hand and there are two ways to do it. One way of sliding the hand, underhand (music playing), why they call it is by playing the figure on the note and then you slide the finger that you were just playing to the place where it will allow you to put your next finger down and be in tune (music playing).

And as one of the church cello side, when we shift, we shift before we change our bow direction before we change our bow in the next and not this (music playing)

But it is this (music playing). And we do that quickly and at the end of the note, it becomes this obvious (music playing)

So that is one way we get around that (music playing), slurpy all the time.

And the next method of shifting is called an overhand shift. It is as supposed to what you saw before, the underhand shift which means, when you are playing, instead of sliding your finger and then dropping at the last minute, you actually push your finger that you are going to land on down and then slide. And that tends to be a shift, a lot of people used when there is an energetic part in the music (music playing)

So, what I am doing is, (music playing) putting my hands down and sliding it before I change my bow (music playing)

It sounds to me like that (music playing), which is different then (music playing), overhand shift.

And that is the two different ways that we shift into positions. Overhand to the connected relevance(ph) (music playing), underhand with the connected bow.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services