Learning and Practicing the Violin
From the category archives:
In the past weeks I got several questions about shifts, correct positions and exercises to improve shifts generally. So let’s take a short break from our practicing series and let’s focus on shifts again. In this article I’ve already mentioned Sevick’s “Op. 8″. A particularly amazing work when it comes to shifts. In that post [...]
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Sometimes we have to play differently than we are accustomed to, concerning our shifts as we talked about previously. That happens occasionally when we look at pieces from the Romantic period. Sometimes we come across things like this: This is measure 13 from Sarasate’s Gypsy Airs. The “II” and the “III” beneath the notes indicate [...]
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In Part 6 we looked upon our almost standard shift, sliding upwards on our last played finger. Obviously, as I already wrote here, there is an exception to this rule. Today we’ll apply this in our Mendelssohn Concerto. For our example I chose the second movement, measures 31 and 32. I left the original fingering [...]
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Before we proceed with our shifting techniques I’d like to provide some photos how to cope with higher positions on the violin because there are some significant differences between lower (1. to 4.) and higher (>5.) positions. Perhaps you remember our left hand geometry we talked about in part 3. Our hand should look like [...]
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Today we’ll have a look into the first measures of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in e Minor. I took the original fingering by Igor Oistrach. Sometimes his fingering is a bit difficult to play because he had huge hands, but in this case it’s absolutely playable by people with normal sized fingers. We begin with the [...]
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We shouldn’t always shift upwards on the last played finger. There is one exception that is very important for reasons of sound. Let’s have a look again at our example we had in part 3 and concentrate on bar 3 and 4: If we perform our shift like the others we would slide on the [...]
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The Czech violinist Otakar Sevcik wrote numerous exercises about bowing techniques, double stops and shifts as well. Interesting for us is his book op.8, written especially for shifting problems. Unfortunately I gave my sample to one of my students, so I must recall it from memory. I don’t know the exact number of this exercise, [...]
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In Part 2 we had a look at the theoretical aspects of shifts. Today we’ll see an example of how to perform a shift correctly. Let’s start with some photos. Here we have a picture of the left hand in the first position: The thumb is more or less opposite to the first finger, the [...]
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Let’s get a bit deeper into the mystery of shifting techniques on the violin. To fully understand what we are doing we have to ask first: What does it mean to change positions? Looking at a normal scale we start with the first finger, for instance and carry on up to the fourth finger. Then [...]
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A weblog created for people who are keen on playing the violin - of course not only for Canadians! Written for people who want to improve their skills on this great instrument.
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