To shift successfully and consistently, make sure you are clear about these six things by answering the following quesitons:
- NOTE – What is the name of the note you are shifting to?
- FINGER – What finger are you shifting to?
- POSITION – What position are you shifting to?
- DISTANCE – If the passage is sequential, is the next note a semitone or a whole tone?
- SOUND – What is the sound of the next note? Sing the pitch in your head.
- PATTERN – Once you are in the new position, what finger pattern do you need to use?
Here’s a tip for memorizing the Six to Shift. Visualize the following silly scene:
1. Imagine you are representing your country in the world’s first NOTE-Flinging Olympics.
2. You take a note and put it on your FINGER.
3. You get yourself into the ideal note-flinging POSITION, and fling the note as far as you can.
4. The referees take a tape measure and quickly run out to measure the DISTANCE your note travelled.
5. When they announce how far your went, you realize that you won, so you jump up and down for joy and make a really loud, victorious SOUND.
6. The audience in the stadium is cheering like crazy and are waving colourful flags in a really cool PATTERN, making you feel really awesome at the sight of it!
This silly story is an example of a memorizing technique called chain-linking. In chain-linking, you tie one word to another in order by creating a story that links the words together one at a time. Try it on something you need to memorize!