How to play fast Notes Part 1

by Steve Maus

How do we practise fast notes?
Very slowly.
Well, it’s not that easy. Sure, the first and most important premise for playing fast is to play right and in tune. That’s only acquired by playing slowly. But sometime you have to increase speed and many people fail during this process.
How can we get to the desired tempo without wasting too much time, raising speed stepwise?
There are probably as many methods as there are violinists on the planet. Some of those procedures became pretty famous because so many players already used them successfully.
Today I’ll show you one of them. Ivan Galamian first published this method in his book Contemporary Violin Technique, but he didn’t supply any user’s manual. Violinists are sometimes a bit lost when confronted with it for the first time. Perhaps my manual will help you to understand how to perform this procedure.

Have a look at this – the first bars of Kreutzer’s Etude No. 2:

Well, we have fixed our intonation so far and we want to increase our speed in short time without losing too much quality. We take the four-note-patterns by Galamian and apply them to our etude:
This method changes the measure from 4/4 to 3/8. The longer notes preserve our intonation, the shorter ones train our speed. Repeat this pattern four or five times and go on to the next step:
You see the fast notes moved to the middle of the bar. Repeat it four or five times. Now comes the third part:
The short notes went to the end of the bar. You guess right – one is missing:

This one is really tricky but very important. It helps us to train the transition from one bar to the next. If you omit the last one, chances are good that you run into problems between certain difficult bars. You can compare this with rails. Some decades ago (yes, I am that old…) rails weren’t welded. You felt the gaps between them consistently. The result was a permanent rattling when you were on a train. With the last pattern we weld together our single bars.

If you practise that way, and I really recommend it, you will gain speed very quickly and efficiently. But there are some things you should note.
First of all: Use your metronome. It’s important to keep your speed even in difficult bars.
Second: Always take your original fingering and bowing. When there are more notes on one stroke, play them likewise. Don’t cheat.
Third: Practise all four patterns the same day. Don’t start with the first on Monday and finish with the last on Saturday.
Fourth: Don’t repeat the single patterns too often. Five times is enough. Otherwise your brain could switch on the autopilot and that’s a waste of time.

And now: Go and practise! :)

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How to play fast Notes Part 2 | Canadian Violin Blog
August 11, 2008 at 8:13 am

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

John Cadd September 11, 2009 at 2:54 pm

One thing I always found hard was placing all the fingers on the string as I ran down.Similar to a cricketer having the bat raised before the bowler lets the ball go.Only one movement required .It took a long time for that penny to drop.

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