Attacking Chicken Attack

by Erica Vacare

Erica is a student of Nan's who rediscovered the cello as an adult.  She enjoys biting off music in small chunks, like a turtle eating a piece of fruit.

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“Have you seen Chicken Attack?” asked my friend Chris.
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
 
I opened the YouTube link he sent. “Looks like a kung fu movie,” I thought. “Wait, did that chicken just turn into a ninja?! Oh my god. Now he’s fighting that guy. And this music is awesome.”

I informed Chris that this was the best thing I’d ever seen, and listened again. And again. I was hooked. After the fourth play in a row, I glanced across the room. Surprisingly, my cat did not look perturbed in the slightest, despite the continuous stream of yodeling coming from my laptop. I clicked the video a fifth time, and pictured how it would sound on the cello. I had to try it. A couple of Google searches later, I was the happy downloader of a straightforward-looking transcription. I printed it out and set it on my music stand.


The first thing I noticed was that the notes on the staff looked higher than Snoop Dogg. No problem, I could just move things down an octave or three. My mind wandered to my cello lesson, which happened to be the following day. I hadn’t played much this week. I pictured Nan, with her usual smile, asking me how my practicing had gone. “Well, I didn’t work on anything except for Chicken Attack,” I would have to confess. How embarrassing. I racked my brain for a way I could make Chicken Attack educational, more respectable. Then I noticed that playing it as written would put it in thumb position, which Nan had conveniently just gone over with me. “Perfect! I’m going to use Chicken Attack as a thumb position exercise!” I declared. My cat seemed unimpressed.


I sat down with my cello (which caused my cat to flee), and set my thumb on the A and D harmonics. I found I could play the beginning of the verse in the hand position Nan had showed me, without having to shift. Sweet. This was going to work well.
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I was congratulating myself on my brilliance when my eyes fell on this high E:

​Not too scary, though. I knew where that note was, after all: a whole step above my third finger on the A-string. But how to get from point A to point B? (Or, more accurately, point E to point higher E?). I wasn’t sure. “I’ll I just skip all those high Es for now,” I thought to myself. This allowed me to continue for a hot two seconds, until a wild F appeared:

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Son of a monkey. If I wanted to play this, I would have to learn how to shift in thumb position. It was inevitable.

I brought the music to my lesson the next day. As Nan and I went over it, it became clear that Chicken Attack would be no mere exercise. It would involve a range of techniques, from basic to advanced! It was the perfect way for a thumb position newbie such as myself to dive right in.

Are you new to thumb position, too? Want to join me? Here are a handful of exercises plucked (sorry) from my practice pad! (Note: the version of Chicken Attack I’m using has been transposed down a fifth from the original, to be a bit more cello-friendly).

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Finding thumb position on the harmonics:

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Bringing the thumb around in measure 4:

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Learning how to move the left hand in an octave structure:

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Utilizing technical shifts:

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Employing a sneaky pinky move in measure 11:

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Chicken Attack used as thumb position training is such a breath of fresh air in the studio!  ​Thanks so much to Erica for sharing it with me and the rest of our cello family. -Nan