Over the past couple of years I’ve been concentrating on playing regulators rhythmically on dance tunes. Unfortunately, in so doing I’ve noticed that I’ve started to “play the bellows” with my right arm, a mistake common among beginners (I’m right-handed). I want to stop doing it because the additional tension in my upper arm is causing me considerable pain at times.
Does anyone have any advice/tips on how to counter this problem? Thanks!
Moving your elbow smoothly toward and away from you side, while briskly moving the wrist up and down isn’t likely among the set of movements you perform during a normal day, up until you decided to play the pipes. I would say you should approach it as you would any difficult passage, or as you would when you learned to smoothly operate the bellows while wiggling you fingers in a musical way: slow it down, and learn to disassociate the two movements from each other until it falls into the realm of “muscle memory”.
dave boling
Great advice. Thanks, I’ll try to incorporate this into my practice.