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 last finger, that’s the third finger, up to the third position. We would end up on the “b”, which is even higher than our actual target, the “a”.
That sounds very… well… unpleasant.
But nevertheless our hand has to remain stable, forcing us to slide on a finger, not just jumping into the next position.
The solution is: We slide on our “target-finger” instead, moving directly to the “a”, producing something like this:
That looks much more complicated than it is in reality.
There is no need to stick to the rhythm exactly as I showed here. I just wanted to show that the “intermediate” note is much less important than the others. We should play it very briefly, just to stabilize the hand during the shift. Usually we can barely hear the note.
When we perform this sort of shift we should watch very carefully where exactly we change our bow. In this case the intermediate note is already on our upbow, if we started with a downbow. That is different from our first shift we looked at in the previous parts of our series. This is essential to conceal the shift successfully.
Well, that was the exception for shifts upwards I already mentioned. Shifts downwards are always performed on the last played fingers unless you want to get special effects like glissando etc.
In the next parts we’ll look into shifts in some violin pieces to show how we can actually use them.
