Posts tagged as:

Positions

Shifting Techniques Part 9

by Steve Maus

In the past weeks I got several questions about shifts, correct positions and exercises to improve shifts generally. So let’s take a short break from our practicing series and let’s focus on shifts again. In this article I’ve already mentioned Sevick’s “Op. 8″. A particularly amazing work when it comes to shifts. In that post [...]

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Higher Positions

by Steve Maus

Before we proceed with our shifting techniques I’d like to provide some photos how to cope with higher positions on the violin because there are some significant differences between lower (1. to 4.) and higher (>5.) positions. Perhaps you remember our left hand geometry we talked about in part 3. Our hand should look like [...]

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Shifting Techniques Part 5

by Steve Maus

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 [...]

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Shifting Techniques Part 4

by Steve Maus

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, [...]

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Shifting Techniques Part 3

by Steve Maus

In Part 2 we had a look at the theoretical aspects of shifts. Today we’ll see an example of how to perform a shift correctly. Let’s start with some photos. Here we have a picture of the left hand in the first position: The thumb is more or less opposite to the first finger, the [...]

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Shifting Techniques Part 2

by Steve Maus

Let’s get a bit deeper into the mystery of shifting techniques on the violin. To fully understand what we are doing we have to ask first: What does it mean to change positions? Looking at a normal scale we start with the first finger, for instance and carry on up to the fourth finger. Then [...]

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Shifting Techniques Part 1

by Steve Maus

Sooner or later every violin student will be confronted with the mystery of leaving the comfortable and cozy first position. I often observe very basic mistakes, even from advanced students, that make changing positions much more difficult or even impossible. In my series about shifting techniques I’ll try to explain the basics and hopefully prevent [...]

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