Learning and Practicing the Violin
From the category archives:
In Part 3 of our series about the vibrato I posted some photos how the fingers should look like during the vibrato. Recently I was asked about pictures of the third and fourth finger because some modifications might be required when it comes to geometry. Let’s start with the third finger. Here we see the [...]
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In the recent posts we used our vibrato to emphasize crescendo and decrescendo without limiting to bowing speed and bow pressure. Today we’ll see how we can apply vibrato differently. Very often we come across longer notes that can be seen as some sort of rest. Perhaps they are even written with a decrescendo. But [...]
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As I already mentioned here our vibrato must never be a matter of mere coincidence. We always have to apply it to emphasize our musical figuration, our crescendo and diminuendo, our musical intentions. What do I mean by “musical figuration”? Musical figuration related to our vibrato means that we look for notes that are more [...]
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When we apply vibrato on an instrument like the violin or viola we must be aware that this vibrato always has to be intentional. It is never a matter of mere coincidence or even boredom. We use vibrato to manipulate our sound as intended. It’s rather difficult to vibrate faster notes, often it’s impossible for [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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, [...]
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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 [...]
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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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