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!
