Seeking Excellence in Right-Hand Finger Alternation for Young Guitarists: Still Trying To Tame Our ‘Dragons’
Over the years of adapting the Suzuki Method for the guitar, right-hand finger alternation has emerged as a fundamental issue for us—as fundamental as the movement of the bow was when Dr. Suzuki developed his Violin Book One. A “dragon” is the generally unwanted practice—known by all Suzuki guitar teachers—of the student moving from a higher string to a lower string by dragging the finger across the strings. This string crossing technique is accomplished with one finger instead of maintaining finger alternation and playing these two notes with two different fingers. As we continue to develop our pedagogy, Suzuki guitar teachers must ask ourselves these questions: How important is this occasional dragging of the fingers of our students? Did Dr. Suzuki face a similar issue in his development of the use of the bow for young students? Can we even compare the use of the bow with the use of the fingers?
Still draggin’ after all these years
I am aware of two well-thought-out academic approaches to fingering our Suzuki Guitar Book One foundational pieces. These approaches were engineered to provide the most secure way to establish the habit of finger alternation in young students. Yet after 30 years of research, many teachers still struggle to firmly establish finger alternation in their students and avoid dragging fingers across the strings.
Maybe the reason the guitars haven’t found the magic formula for this is the same reason that the violins haven’t either. Dr. Suzuki begins the first several pieces in his Violin Book One with the simple rule of “start with the down bow and keep alternating.” There are several exceptions to this rule later in Book One, and violin teachers will tell you that most of these exceptions require ongoing occasional “review maintenance” to keep all the bows in the group class moving in the same direction. Should we, as guitarists, expect anything different? Maybe we have to think about how many exceptions to the rule students can tolerate.
Making room for ‘immature’ playing for the sake of pedagogical goals
Several violin Teacher Trainers have told me that for the sake of maintaining alternation of the bow, Dr. Suzuki tolerated several somewhat “immature” bowings in his Book One, though nothing that would violate students’ later development. These immature fingerings allowed Dr. Suzuki to limit the number of directives that the student is asked to pay attention to in each piece. It comes down to recognizing the limited bandwidth of a child’s attention and remembering that “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” (which, in this case, is the correct bow direction).
In his Violin Book One, Dr. Suzuki really did tailor his mature violin playing to the intellectual limitations of children. A violin Teacher Trainer recently told me, “Yes, of course Dr. Suzuki did this! If I’m playing the Book One Bach Minuets at a wedding gig, I don’t bow them the way they are bowed in Book One because I don’t want to sound like a Book One student!” I don’t think the venerable Mr. Bach or the likes of Mr. Galamian are rolling over in their graves because of these small concessions made by Dr. Suzuki.
You would, of course, not teach “immature fingerings” to conservatory students, but these are not encore pieces! Beginning students need these building blocks to enable them to function as conservatory students. Another violin Teacher Trainer recently told me that she was answering a student who was complaining about “only” being in Book One. She said to him, “You are not in Book One. You are in Book Ten! These pieces are the warm-up for Book Ten!”
We see groups of young Suzuki violinists able to move their bows all in uniform alternation. Why is that so difficult for guitarists to achieve? Is this challenge easier for violinists than it is for guitarists? The answer to this is yes, but a very qualified yes. It is not that this is an easier skill for the violins, it is just that they have several advantages over guitarists in their technical and musical environments.
Technical advantages of the violin environment
- Bow movements are large and easy to model and imitate compared to the small finger movements of a guitarist’s right-hand fingers. In group classes, violin students strive to be consistent with their peers in terms of their bow strokes. Nobody wants to be the odd man out! Young violinists who consistently miss group class require more maintenance in this area of their playing during their private lessons. Right-hand guitarist finger movements, tiny by comparison, are not as easily modeled and imitated, especially in a group setting. Guitar students don’t watch whether the teacher starts with the middle or index finger. Because of this, right-hand finger dragons are sneakier, with right-hand fingering improvisations going undetected in group settings. Guitar group lessons just do not visually reinforce correct guitarist right-hand fingerings.
- Participation in orchestras and other advanced ensembles also reinforces uniform bow direction. In contrast, guitarists in advanced ensembles very rarely if ever pay attention to consistent right-hand fingerings between shared parts. The questions of whether to start scales with the index or middle finger, or how we accomplish our string crossings, are never an issue in advanced guitar ensembles. This lack of uniformity among advanced guitarists is permitted because there usually is no need for it musically, and certainly not visually.
Claiming that the violin has several environmental advantages over the guitar is not meant to say that the violin is easier by any means! I only mean that the instrument and the environment that supports it are more powerful in lending themselves to the development of consistent and uniform right-hand function.
Musical advantages of the violin environment
- Bow direction is intimately tied to musical expression: down bow on the strong beat, up bow on the weak beat. This is consistent throughout the violin repertoire—the music itself reinforces the bowings. Therefore, bowings are musically intuitive and easier to memorize. Guitarist right-hand fingers are not similarly attached to phrasing. The alternation of our fingers is not nearly as driven by musical phrasing as is the bow on the violin.
- The guitar string crossing dragons are not only more difficult to see, but also to hear. In the early guitar repertoire, usually before most students are playing with nails, it is impossible to hear the difference between a string crossing executed by dragging fingers and one executed with alternating fingers. Even using nails, it is possible to produce a consistent tone when dragging the fingers. This is not true in the case of errant bow direction on the violin. Violin bows need to move together not only because it looks better—it actually sounds better.
The violins do have an equivalent of the guitarist string crossing dragon. In the Twinkle theme, the young violinist is often tempted to continue their bow direction when going on to the next note located on a lower string, and they must be trained not to do this. This Twinkle bowing error on the violin is not only much more visually evident than a guitarist’s dragging finger, but the teacher can also hear the difference on the violin. I am told that violinists with a good ear can actually listen to a recording and hear the difference between an up and down bow (something of course completely lost on a guitarist like me).
Taming the dragons on the Twinkle theme
Again, “dragons” appear when guitar students are required to move from a higher to a lower string. If starting the Twinkle theme with the middle finger, the very first “dragon” we usually encounter is near the end of the first phrase of Twinkle (moving from the sixth to the seventh note of this piece). This is where the student is required to cross from the first to the second string. If you start Twinkle with the index, you often see this dragon at the end of the second phrase, crossing from the second to the third string. The only way to avoid these inclinations to drag the fingers on the Twinkle theme is to employ the strategy of directing the student to start every phrase with the index. This means asking the student to do a retake of the index from the end of one phrase to the beginning of the next phrase. If this strategy does, in fact, eliminate dragons, then the advantage might be a better way to habituate the student’s fingers to constant alternation.
But this approach has to be weighed against the advantage of a second possible strategy, that of just challenging the student to “face his dragons” by maintaining alternation, regardless of what finger starts. This strategy avoids retakes and requires the student to face the challenge of maintaining alternation when moving from a higher to lower string right out of the gate in the Twinkles. The comparative results of these two strategies are still not conclusive to everyone in the Suzuki guitar community.
It is interesting to note what Dr. Suzuki did to address string crossings in the case of the Twinkle theme. The violin parallel to a guitarist starting every phrase of the Twinkle theme with the index would be to start every phrase of Twinkle on the violin with a downstroke. Some students will attempt to execute a clumsy retake of the bow in their effort to start the second phrase of Twinkle with a down bow. Such a bowing is musically dictated by the instinct to play the downbeats with a down bow. Dr. Suzuki instead instructed his students to keep alternating, starting this second phrase with an up bow.
This would have been a perfect opportunity for Dr. Suzuki to introduce a retake bowing, and yet he preferred to focus instead on the alternation of the bow, regardless of musical or other technical considerations. Dr. Suzuki’s primary initial pedagogical challenge for the bow was to teach the student to maintain alternation, no matter how the string crossings presented themselves. Again, the jury is out on how much this applies to guitar fingering.
Some questions still to come to terms with
In Violin Book One, the notes and the bowings are the critical issues, and the left-hand fingerings are less important. It is interesting that the same scenario seems to be appearing in the Suzuki guitar world. The big debate (at least for Suzuki Guitar Book One) seems to be about right-hand fingerings. With left-hand fingerings being far easier to come to a consensus about, the inevitable conclusion for the guitar may be that it is just the notes and the left-hand fingerings that are important in terms of a shared method, the right hand being left up to the individual teacher’s convictions.
In our continuing quest to tame our string crossing dragons, there are a few big questions that it seems the Suzuki guitar community has yet to come to a conclusion about:
- Does the occasional dragging of the fingers impede the student’s future technical or musical progress?
- To what extent do advanced performers use the occasional dragging of the fingers as a legitimate form of string crossing? Does that affect our pedagogy for beginning guitarists?
- Given the nature of our instrument, is an occasional dragging of the fingers in our early repertoire something that can be completely removed from young players?
- Just how important is this issue?
Is life without dragons the ‘Holy Grail’ of guitar playing?
The fundamental question we are seeking to answer is this: if a student occasionally drags their fingers across the strings in this early repertoire, does that mean we have failed to establish the habit of alternation? Does this reflect an improper or undeveloped pedagogy? Or is an “occasional dragon” something we are going to have to live with, given the limitations imposed by both the teaching of children and the nature of our instrument?
One of my favorite memories from Monday morning group class in Matsumoto with Dr. Suzuki and the other kenkyusei (student teachers) was his constant declaration of “new idea!” He would demonstrate his idea, and then one by one the idea would be passed around the room, played, and examined. It has been heartening to watch this creative spirit from Dr. Suzuki being kept alive over the years by the large group of Suzuki guitarists who have produced what I believe is the finest guitar method in the world. Some of our “new ideas” have withstood the test of time. Other ideas come and go, sometimes only after realizing that we have strained out a gnat and then swallowed a camel!
It has been a great thirty or so years developing our Suzuki Guitar Method, and I hope I’m around for the next thirty to witness our continued pursuit of excellence in this issue of taming our string crossing dragons. Possibly our greatest challenge here as we develop our methodology concerning the right hand is to keep the big picture of the child’s musical and technical development in mind as we continue these efforts to refine our students’ abilities. This is a quest that Dr. Suzuki quite correctly called our “research.”