How To Learn Cello

Hello. My name is Matthew Forbes from the Music Workshop Company. I'm going to take you through how to tune some instruments, how to play basically, and also how to read the notated music for them.

Here, in some very basic steps is how to get you started on playing the cello. I have the cello on me here. It's about - I'm sat so that my feet are equally apart, flat on the floor, and my knees and my hips are around the same level, my knees slightly lower, probably.

The cello sits on me, I put the spike about equidistant, the same distance, from my chair and my feet, and my spike goes there, and it sits on my chest here but clear enough from my ear so that I don't have to change the way I'm sat with my head. And it goes on my left side, and my left hand is what changes the notes. The bow is always in my right hand, whether you're right or left-handed, it is always the same way around and the bow is the hardest part of playing the cello because that's where all the sound comes from.

What we're trying to achieve is for the bow to stay in the same area that we start, and also to go in an absolutely straight 90 degree-line - 90 degrees to the strings. So for that, it's a combination of shoulder, elbow, and wrist. The shoulder sinks the bow into the strings, so you want to feel weight.

This doesn't want to move a lot like this, it should just feel downwards. Most of the movement comes from the elbow joint, so if you start a bow on any of the strings, right at the very tip, you'll feel that the arm is at its - that's the longest it needs to stretch. And most of the movement is come from the elbow there.

The wrist's job primarily is to stabilize the line. So it doesn't move a great deal, but it needs to be flexible. The fingers also need to be able to move so that we get different pronunciations and articulations in the note.

That comes from the fingers. Just while we're talking about the bow, the bow-hold is a very important thing. The four fingers need to be slightly apart so that there's nothing rigid, the four fingers do actually move independently.

For the shape and size of my hand, it suits me to put my little finger somewhere on the button, my ring finger on the metal, my second finger sort of hanging over the hair, like that, and the first finger just sitting in front of it, like that. It's different from the violin bow-hold; the violin bow-hold is much more pronounced towards that, but of course unlike the violin, we don't have gravity on our side, so we need to keep the bow off the floor and it needs to be a little bit stronger. The thumb goes in the center of the hand.

I play with a bent thumb and just to allow flexibility, and it sits in the butt of the - of this part of the bow here. So it's flexible. As far as the bowing area is concerned, between the end of the fingerboard here and the bridge, we do get different qualities of sound depending on where we are.

The fingerboard is sort of breathy and more flute-like we are, and we can't afford to give very much weight in that area, but as we move downwards, the weight needs to increase from the arm so that by the time you get to the bridge, the quality of the sound is a very different color. But it projects a lot more from that area as well. Generally, if you're starting off, a middle area for bowing is a good idea, so about halfway between.

With the left hand, and you see we've got nothing to help, there's no nothing visual and there are no frets, so everything is done by ear and by feel. On the cello, there is a semi-tone between each finger, the exception being between the open string and the first finger. So the first, at first my index finger goes a tone above my open string, so if I'm on the D string, a whole tone to an E and then after that, it's semi-tones.

That's what we call first position, to play a major scale, the do-re-mi scale, over two strings, starting on the lower, so we're going - so we're playing G major, so we