Learning and Practicing the Violin

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 technical reasons. We’ll leave out those passages. In addition, these fast notes are so short that they are even finished before we have completed an entire vibrato oscillation, thus resulting in an off-key note. So let’s concentrate on the longer notes.
As I already mentioned here we must learn to vibrate pointedly. To train this we chose an easier Etude by Pracht or Wohlfahrt like this one:

When we practise this we have to be sure to vibrate every single quarter note. On the eighth notes we suppress our vibrato. Through this we learn to apply the vibrato exactly when we want to, not accidentally, which is very important as we’ll see later in this series.
Feel free to experiment with those sorts of Etudes. The more you train the better you get. There are loads of Etudes appropriate for that.
But remember - you do that because you want to improve your vibrato. So you must apply vibrato! Your vibrato won’t get better by reading, only by playing.

If you are happy with that we go one step further. A huge step, though.
Our vibrato developes to a real stylistic device only if we are able to adjust frequency and amplitude. We also call that intensity. The faster and larger we move the more intense we get.

Here your have an exercise for that, but don’t start this unless you managed the previous one:

The intensity changes the same way we change our dynamic. They are directly related to each other in this exercise. The higher the volume the higher the intensity.
Best is to start piano with an up-bow and almost no vibrato. As soon as you get louder you increase your vibrato intensity as well. When you play the decrescendo you also diminish the intensity to almost nil.

The result will be an amazingly impressive crescendo which you cannot achieve by bowing technique alone.

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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 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.

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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 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!

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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 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!

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