by Steve Maus on November 30, 2008
Hopefully you folks practiced a lot during the past week. Meanwhile your family has recovered from the shock of your first vibrato steps and we can carry on.
Your vibrato has become much better thanks to the exercises of part 5. Now we must learn to apply our vibrato pointedly. We must be able to vibrate the notes instantly and without any delay. In our exercise of the previous part we had a very long settling time which we have to get rid of.
We can take an exercise like this:
We use our metronome again and adjust it to about 60. The rest between the notes is most important! Your hand has time to relax because the fingers must not tense up.
The frequency or the amplitude are not important yet. The most important part for us is the instant application of vibrato. Start to vibrate at the very beginning of each note and use the rests to relax again.
Again - it’s not important how intense you produce your vibrato as long as you vibrate at all and instantly. If you tense up it will be almost impossible to vibrate and your intonation suffers.
When you did this exercise for a while you can start to train your endurance with something like this:
We didn’t change really much. We keep our tempo at about 60 and just double the notes and the rests as well. But please remember to start your vibrato at the beginning of each note. Because of the longer rest your hand should have enough time to recover again.
You should perform those exercises on all strings and in different positions but don’t exceed the fourth. From the fifth position on we change our hand grip, but we’ll look at that in one of the following posts.
by Steve Maus on November 23, 2008
After all those technical aspects of vibrato on the violin we come to the question “how on earth should I practice such a complicated movement?”
This is not as difficult as it sounds at the beginning.
We already saw that a vibrato is nothing else than a consistent oscillation of the tone’s pitch, comparable to a sine wave. We achieve that by performing kind of tiny shifts up und downward. Either by shifting with our arm during the arm vibrato or coming from the wrist during the hand vibrato.
So first of all we have to practice to perform those small shifts in an adequate speed without moving our fingers.
There are lots of exercises dealing with that. Personally, I had great success with the following exercise. To do this, better use a practice mute and evacuate your family because it will sound a bit strange.
Here we go:
Due to limitations of my music printing software I’m not able to produce quarter tones, but I hope the idea is clear.
It’s best to begin in the third position because the arm is bent more than in the first position, making it more comfortable for us.
The oscillations we produce are not as large as a half-tone. They just have to be audible.
Start practicing with a metronome and adjust it to about 60. That’s perfectly ok for us. Repeat the different bars as desired, also depending on your degree of weariness. Stay relaxed, don’t tense up!
Please keep in mind - the finger remains in position. It just rolls over the tip like a small ball.
If you are still fresh enough to carry on you can do an additional tempo on top of that:
Concerning speed that’s pretty much our desired vibrato.
If you are not tired start with the second finger:
The principle is the same as above, no half-tones but smaller oscillations. After finishing that you can start with the third and the fourth finger.
And now comes the most important part:
Don’t press yourself. Take your time and be patient.
Your muscles need time to get used to this sort of movement, they need time to develop. Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t build up his muscles within a few days. Same is with our vibrato.
There will be days when your vibrato runs flawlessly. The next day it might be rotten. It depends on your daily constitution, and this is absolutely normal. The following day will be better again. Your brain needs the time to learn to pass the correct commands to your muscles.
In the following post we’ll look at further options to practice the vibrato.
Have fun developing your vibrato. If you continue consequently you’ll succeed!
by Steve Maus on November 16, 2008
In Part 3 of our series about the vibrato we mainly talked about the arm vibrato. Today we’ll have a deeper look into the hand vibrato.
I’m asked frequently which version is better. This cannot be answered generally. It depends on our personal preferences and, above all, which version we have learned first. We tend to stick to this version all life long. As long as we are able to create the tone that matches our intentions there is no need to change anything. So better leave your way of vibrato untouched unless your are not satisfied with the result.
Personally, I prefer the arm vibrato for beginners because most rookies seem to get along better with an arm movement than they do with a movement coming from the wrist. But there are many differences and many violinists develop some sort of mixture during their career.
But let’s get a bit more detailed. In part 3 we saw that our finger has to remain in position of our mean tone. It merely oscillates on the fingertip, thus creating the vibrating sound.
We managed this by moving the arm as if we wanted to perform a shift up and downwards, just smaller. The wrist had to be stable to pass this movement directly to the fingers and the fingertips as shown on the photo above.
We have a totally different approach to the hand vibrato. The fingers also remain in position, rolling over the fingertips, but this time the movement is developed in our wrist. This movement is comparable to waving goodbye to somebody while the arm remains in position.
Advantages and drawbacks depend entirely on the player and his preferences. We cannot tell which one is better. It’s a matter of taste. You have to try it out which one is better for you. Both versions a good when performed well.
In the next post we’ll see how we can practice the vibrato.
Have fun playing!
by Steve Maus on November 9, 2008
As we have seen here we have to be sure that our finger remains in position during the vibrato movements. The finger must not leave its position as it is the case during shifts.
But nevertheless we have to oscillate our tone.
The solution is pretty easy: We let the finger roll on its tip, like a ball on the string. Through this we leave it in position and oscillate simultaneously.
It is most important that our hand position is correct, the wrist must not be bent in any way and the thumb has to be relaxed opposite the first finger. It should look like this:
In this post we’ll limit to the arm vibrato. We perform a movement as if we want to shift downward, but just a tiny bit, perhaps a quarter tone or even less, followed by a “shift” upward, about a quarter tone higher than our first tone and down again.
The result is a chain of small shifts up and downward. There we have our sine wave again. The small shifts oscillate around the mean tone in the middle, thus creating the desired vibrating effect.
The only difference between the vibrato and ordinary shifts, apart from the size, is the fact that the finger doesn’t leave its position and is rolling over the tip instead.
When we perform our “shift” downward it should result in something like this:
I’ve exaggerated a little bit for clarification, but basically that’s the movement we need. The arm kind of pulls down the finger.
The subsequent shift upward pulls the finger in the opposite direction, we roll over our fingertip without leaving the present position and we should end up like this:
By repeating this movements up und downward while we increase speed we get our first vibrato.
But keep in mind: We have to be relaxed. The fingers and the arm must not create any tension, otherwise we would spoil the whole movement.
Congratulations - you’ve done your first vibrato!
In the next post we’ll have a look into the hand vibrato.
by Steve Maus on October 26, 2008
Before we start exploring the vibrato and it’s technical aspects we have to look at some terms that are used to describe certain vibrato techniques.
Dealing with waves we stumble upon three main physical terms:
Frequency, wave length and amplitude.
The frequency of a tone is directly related to the tone pitch. The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. The term frequency means the number of oscillations within a certain timeframe, usually a second. If you have a frequency of 440Hz it means there are 440 oscillations within one second.
The wave length is not interesting for us. It’s related to the frequency. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wave length. Just for the sake of completeness…
The amplitude describes the size of the oscillations in our wave. In other words: How big the waves are.
For a tone you could explain the amplitude as the sound pressure. The larger the amplitude the louder the tone.
When we look at the vibrato those terms become a different meaning because we describe a movement, not a steady tone.
The frequency of our vibrato means the number of oscillations of our vibrato movement. The faster we vibrate the higher is our vibrato frequency. The vibrato amplitude is the “size” of our vibrato. If we increase our movements we also increase the vibrato amplitude.
The result is:
If we change our vibrato frequency the tone doesn’t change as well. Our mean tone remains on the same tone frequency.
When we change the vibrato amplitude we don’t change the sound pressure as well. We get a bigger change in tone frequency instead since we increase our vibrato movements.
You see, frequency and amplitude have totally different effects or meanings depending on what we try to describe.
In this series I will mainly refer to the description of movements, not tones and their physical explanation.
I won’t finish this physical crash course for musicians without an outlook what’s coming next.
A vibrato is a controlled movement that results in a consistent oscillation of the tone. Those oscillations are performed with the finger that plays the tone. But the finger must not leave the position. It remains in the same position!
How do we manage that?
Well, that’s the topic of the following post. So stay tuned!
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