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Home/Library/Fingering & Technique/What is "scissoring" and how can you avoid it?
▶ Video LessonIntermediateFree Preview📅 Posted February 12, 2014· 4m

What is "scissoring" and how can you avoid it?

⚡ The Short Version

Scissoring is lifting a gracenote first, then dropping the melody finger afterward, instead of moving them together. It's named for the scissor-like motion of the fingers, and it creates a crossing noise that gets worse as your playing speeds up.
The fix is simple: lift everything together on the way up, and drop everything together on the way down. Going from any note up to F with a high G gracenote, that means all three fingers lift at once, not the gracenote finger first and the rest a moment later.
The same scissoring problem happens on the bottom hand with a D gracenote going to C. It's the exact same motion on a different pair of fingers, so the same fix — lift together, drop together — applies there too.
Video🔒 Members Only
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What is "scissoring" and how can you avoid it?
4m · Full class available to Inner Circle members

⏱️ In this class

00:02case G the up of gracenotes the and special scale, F🔒
01:36What scissoring like: first lifting looks gracenote the🔒
02:23Why crossing as you scissoring noise speed up causes a🔒
03:00lift together, together drop fix: The🔒
04:00gracenote same D hand: issue The bottom the C on to🔒

About this class

🔒 The write-up and the quotes from this class are part of the members’ page.

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playing right up this basically have pretty the the and G the just every basic scale to we pretty down tune very a… that Simple might G so look there's gracenotes up all gracenotes high we're finger up on Universal now down and in gracenote gracenote scale G like accustomed So
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