Book review: Thumb Position

Thumb Position

Charlotte Mohrs

92PP ISBN 9783795727901

Schott Music €23.50 

This volume is designed to introduce playing in thumb position on the double bass. It has plenty of material, with an emphasis on making this skill easy and fun, and uses simple exercises and some familiar tunes. It is also aimed at expanding learning to enable players to progress to more advanced repertoire. If you want to add piano accompaniment, there is a free download on the Schott website.

Teachers might find the introduction helpful, where the structure of the book is explained. Although at the start it emphasises teaching (and thus learning) with playful ease, the author contradicts herself somewhat by describing thumb position as one of the most demanding techniques in learning the double bass. I am not sure I agree with that. She mentions that there is a gap of available material and that many method books only touch on the subject, or are too dry and complex. It may be worth mentioning that Simplified Higher Technique by Francesco Petracchi was published many years ago and Cathy Elliott’s Introduction to Thumb Position has been around for at least three decades, not to mention the extensive ‘New technique’ in five volumes of François Rabbath, or David Allen Moore’s brilliant Fractal Fingering.

The book is closely aligned with the basic principles of Petracchi’s position labelling. There is nothing in this volume that emphasises the importance of a well-adjusted bass to aid the acquisition of thumb position in as relaxed a way as possible and, more importantly, without tension. The volume has a wealth of material for students to play. Very quickly the early pieces demand they progress across the strings, which I consider rather early, but I agree with the use of B flat major as a helpful scale early on. I also often find that it takes time to develop enough weight in the fingers to use a third finger. This makes obvious sense as we have mostly not used it in earlier playing.

I like the chapter on transition from the neck position to the thumb position, although I would use different fingerings. I long ago gave up using the third finger on the G harmonic, as I find students have to turn their hand and thus create unstable intonation owing to the change of shape. However, the principle of moving freely around this area is good.

The book progresses to extending the range of notes to D, and may be helpful for teachers and students who are using thumb positions early in their thinking. The importance of the bow is not mentioned until page 45, which is surprising to me as teaching thumb position is all about the bow. I prefer to use words such as ‘weight’ in both the left hand and the bow rather than ‘pressure’, but I realise this could be a translation matter.

Towards the end of the book there are more extensive pieces for teachers and students to get into, and some excerpts and examples of standard repertoire for the double bass.

CAROLINE EMERY