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, I just know it’s there:
Sevcik published bar 3 only, but this one also from position 2 to 4, from 3 to 5 and so on, on all four strings. The above version is the method I use, if possible I even double the speed in bar 4.
So the student has time to get accustomed to the correct distances before proceeding to the subsequent positions.
So far so good. Let’s have a look at bar 2. We have a shift from the first finger in the first position to the fourth finger in the third position. Do you remember this shift? We already looked at it in part 3 of our series.
If we perform the shift correctly we have to slide to the third position on our first finger because it’s the last one before the shift. Upon arrival upstairs we drop our fourth finger – and that’s it!
Nothing else is prepared and practiced in bar 1 of Sevcik’s exercise. That makes Sevcik so interesting. You learn something without actually realizing it.
The entire exercise is played this way:
Due to limitations of my freeware notation software again, I had to write it that way. The rhythm is not that important. It’s just the “intermediate” note that has to be there.
As you can see the shift in bar 2 (1-1-4) is exactly the same we already played in bar 1 (1-1-4).
By the way – if you really want to improve your shifting techniques Sevcik’s op.8 is by far the best book you can get. If you practise those exercises thoroughly you’ll get a technique that will never fail you.
Go and grab it! 
In the next part we’ll have a look at the exceptions I already mentioned in the previous post.
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Left Hand, Shifting, Violin Lessons
