Did some/any/all of "the greats" use fingerboard aids as beginners?

It's great way for kids with zero musicality to visualize the notes on the fingerboard as they develop their ears.

For what it's worth, such things were unheard of even in my beginning Suzuki class in the mid 1960s. Never had anything on my fingerboard. We learned to use our ears from the beginning.

I used the Doflein method and in there were nice drawings of the hand for each of the different positions of the half step. Those were very clear and enough for me.

I would guess that some of the players who started in the 1970s and 1980s may have used finger tapes. Definitely by the time early training was common through the Suzuki method tapes were being used widely.

In the past, many students who didn't have circumstances that were ideal would quit rather than successfully working through the beginning stages.

And children starting younger than 5 would have been extremely rare in the pre-Suzuki era. Suzuki almost singlehandedly created the market for fractional violins below 1/2 size.

I started at 16. No tapes. Violin and viola were my fourth and fifth instruments.

"If the pupil has a good musical hearing, then there is no need to make use of such excesses; but if he lacks that, then he is incapable of playing music, and he may take on a barrel organ rather than a violin with more advantage."

(my translation, from the Dutch 18th century edition)

My cello teacher's technique for hammering in an intimate knowledge of the geography of the fingerboard was to tell the young pupil (me) to shut their eyes and then to play a random note he'd call out, and do it on a particular string with a particular finger. A few weeks of that regime does wonders for finding one's way round the upper reaches of the fingerboard without looking! Much more recently I have used that method on the violin.

However, tapes are really useful in group string classes with 50-100 (or more) students, especially in the fourth and fifth grade level that is common as the entry point for ensemble education in the United States. With my K-12 program, it's fairly common for fourth graders who have never played an instrument to make use of the visual aids, as it speeds their comprehension of the abstraction of the written notes on the page to the equivalent location of the note on the fingerboard, as well as the concept of whole and half steps. Respectfully, I would venture that the folks who say they should *never* be used have not had to be in front of a huge elementary cohort of beginners who don't read music yet--and thus lack that particular perspective which could provide some understanding and empathy of what our public school music teachers face all across the country.

Interestingly enough, a successful bass soloist (!) that I know has a gorgeous decorative inlay in their fingerboard on their solo instrument--one time backstage they demonstrated to me how visual elements of the inlay actually served as a virtual "fret" for them to have better accuracy with the high register, especially for all the harmonics near or off the end of the fingerboard.

BTW we had steel E strings (sounded like cheese wire), plain gut A and D and wire wound G (that made a loud whooshing sound if you happened to slide up it). And no SR either, but a bean-pad was optional ;)

A student who has to "learn" good intonation will probably advance too slowly to become a professional, let alone a "great". But he or she still deserves our full attention, just through wanting to play. Do they not!

I have personally found that tapes are rarely a problem in my own teaching, and I'll usually add tapes any time that I'm trying to really get into what the names of the notes are, even if the student has good attention span. This is because it provides a basis for visualization of the distances and intervals. Some people are just visual learners, which means that they'll learn faster if they can see what's going on first, even if we quickly get away from literally looking, and instead imagine the distances in our head.

It's extremely rare that I have issues with students not being able to look away from the tapes. But I think this has to do with me adding a fair amount of supplemental sight-reading to their studies early on, which switches their brain to looking at the music instead of their hands. I also don't make rules about never looking at the the left hand, because occasionally peeking to prepare for a difficult transition is, in my opinion, a fine habit.

I think video games or typing are a really good example of why visual symbols aren't really an issue, and in fact are quite necessary in some cases. You'll notice that if a kid is using a console controller (like an Xbox or something), the buttons on the control are all labelled. Usually X, Y, A, B. However, once a kid has been playing on this console for a short time, they're not looking at their fingers at all anymore, because the screen in front of them *demands* their attention. Yet, having the reference to the letter-names on the buttons is still crucial for the initial learning process. They need to be able to "imagine" the letter-names in correlation to where their fingers are in order to be able to look exclusively at the screen.

Typing is another great example. Imagine that you're new to typing, and you look down at the keyboard and it's just a mass of black keys, with no letters on the keys. When you press a key, you see the corresponding letter appear on the screen, so it's theoretically possible to learn this way. But it would take *forever* to become proficient in comparison to the student that has letters on the keys. Because even though we quickly learn to type without watching our fingers, that initial visual aspect is very important to gain traction.

However, if I hadn't taken a good class on typing, I would still be looking down at my fingers. So clearly it's vital that the teacher recognizes that the tapes will become the primary source of attention unless music is routinely given that is fresh to the student, thus requiring them to look at the music itself a majority of the time, while still utilizing the visualization aspect that the tapes provided.

I should also mention: ----*none of my students have tapes after Suzuki book 3 level is finished, and all of my ideas about tapes correspond to the beginner stage*---- It is my opinion that if a student is still routinely using tapes in the intermediate stage, then they probably missed out on some important aspect of training in the beginner stage.

80% of the time, I take the tapes off of a young student's fingerboard because they're not using them anymore. A lot of the time they've forgotten they're on the violin. I consider this a good thing. When I do take tapes off, I usually take the 2+3 off simultaneously, and then later on I take the 4 off, and finally the 1. When all tapes have been removed, I have the student do something I call a "left hand calibration" to really sort out the intervals and to start focusing on a new level of intonation which exclusively uses the ears.

I use them for the fourth grade beginners so they can develop the hand frame, then over the months we gradually remove the tapes as they learn the whole/half step concepts until they only have the first finger one in place, and once they reach fifth grade we do additional ear training that allows them to remove it entirely--and then the tapes have served their purpose.

I also feel terrible when I get a new student who has been playing for 4-5 years in their school programs and they absolutely have to look at the colored tape every time to put a finger down...

My daughter, who started at 4yrs old, also uses the Suzuki method, and her teacher put tapes on her violin as a guide.

I just took the tapes off her violin a couple of days ago. My daughter, who is now 7 yrs old, and has graduated from book 1, and starting book 2. What I observed is that she has become reliant on the tape to figure out where the "note" is, instead of relying on her ears to make sure she is actually in tune.

Once I took the tapes off, it did not take too long for her to be in tune and adjust when needed. She plays her A, D, and G major scales very cleanly and in tune, as well as all her book 1 pieces.

I told her teacher, and her teacher agreed that sometimes the tape can be a crutch after a certain point.

I started violin on a private lesson, but quickly move to group lesson because of lack of fund. In the 2-3 private lessons I had so far, the teacher spent a good chunk of time talking and correcting me on posture. According to him, looking at the fingerboard while playing the violin is a bad posture. He told me that you get neck tension if you rotate your neck to the left to look. The more you look, the more neck tension you get. In turn, you may pick up stress/pain, and discourage to pracitse for a longer duration of time. Ideally, I should always look forward, either at the music or at the audience.

As a result, I never use tape because I am not suppose to turn my head left to look at them.

However, it doesn't mean I magically get the intonation right. I don't have a lot of music training as a child, apart from casually playing recorder, sing some hymn and folk tunes. I started ear training a few weeks after I started to violin, and it took me the entire semester to identify some basic intervals. I still practise the tonalization exercise from the Suzuki book, and playing double stop with an open string. Do I nail the intonation in those exercises? Far from it.

No, sir. It wasn't damaging at all. In fact I truly believed it aided her tremendously. But I also believe there is a point where you just need to take it off and truly listen, rather than using it as a crutch.

Of course, that also means I got my first full size violin, then went through puberty, which was a whole different set of learning challenges.