In technically more sophisticated pieces we often come across double stops that are really difficult to play.
Today I’ll show you an example how we can practice them very efficiently without wasting too much time. For this example I chose Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1, first movement, letter E:
This is really hard to play unless we practiced those kind of double stops for months. Thirds are generally more difficult to play than octaves, for instance. The reason is – we have to switch between major and minor thirds, whereas octaves remain as they are. We just have to alter the distance between first and fourth finger.
OK, we start again with our intonation:
If we cannot play the third in tune we have to break it up as I showed above. The first a on the g string is very important because this way we train the transition to the third as well.
We go a little further:
We practice the other double stops likewise. So we connect the first double stop with the second, the second with the third, the third with the fourth double stop and so on.
This way we improve our intonation greatly. If we are happy with this we play the double stops without preparation:
And further on:
You see, the principle is always the same. Essential is the connection between the double stops. Of course, repetition is important as usual, I simply omitted them because of space reasons.
Now comes the most interesting part. Unfortunately this stage is neglected very often although it is so important for a successful completion of our work.
We put our parts together by applying the fingers as they should be, but we play just one tone. So the left hand plays double stops, the right hand limits to single notes. We hear something like this:
Or, we rather should hear it. Probably there will be some intonation problems. But it’s much easier to identify them.
The same happens with the upper notes:
But remember: Only the left hand plays double stops. The right hand plays just one string.
When we finished these exercises we can start to play the passage as it should be. Intonation will be significantly better than without the last two exercises.
