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Share your violin technique secrets here
Hello everybody,This is the stuff I came for originally. I know it's tempting to keep the good stuff to yourself, but there's got to be some lesser secrets that you can share. I will start with all the secrets that I've discovered that I want to share...
1)It's possible to create a kind of accent on the violin by playing around with the coordination of the bow and the fingers. If you play the note before you put the finger on, it creates a kind of twangy sound. I've seen a video online of someone doing it, so it's not a complete secret, but it's one of the more interesting techniques I've discovered for myself.
2)Practising dominant-sevenths helps with intonation.
3)If you practice the violin like a guitar, it helps change the way you think of music and can add an extra layer of musicality to your playing.
4)If you practise staccatto with the entire bow for a long time, you'll discover that some parts of the bow don't do staccato well. Also, Heifetz's way of doing it with the bow hairs facing away from the player is actually not the best way to do it due to the brain not being able to control as well as when the bow is held normally. (Everyone's different, but this felt like a secret when I discovered this.)
5)If you play notes extremely in tune, even songs that don't sound musical begin to sound pleasant to the ear.
6)In Mendelssohn's Concerto, you can actually go all the way up the G string to play that beginning part.
7)It's possible to play on the G string and have it not sound differently from the other strings.
8)When a violin is perfectly in tune, all the strings will ring.
9)It's possible to hear the difference between equal temperament and just intonation. I can't do it anymore, but for a few days, I was able to hear that a particular singer used equal temperament instead of just intonation. It took me 30 years to discover this.
10)If you do a lot of single-position scales, you'll eventually discover that there's a note on your violin that is always out of tune. It's called a wolf tone. (This was a secret to me when I first encountered it).
11)It's possible to interpret music so that phrasing is based off of how you feel rather than what the notes actually are.
12)There are actually two ways to produce a tone with the bow. If you play with just a single hair, you can get a really pure-sounding sound that sounds really nice.
13)Some cracks improve the sound of your violin
14)When tuning, you can use a standing wave to hear a small increase in volume when your violin matches with the tuning pitch.
15)I think your brain can actually understand what an exact correct interval is supposed to sound like.
16)Playing outdoors reveals things about the fact that your violin is made out of wood that you might not necessarily experience if you always play indoors.
17)It's possible to make the violin sound much more like a bumblebee than any recording that I've found on the Internet. I have only did this twice, but I know it's possible.
18)You can actually feel the location of correct location for correct intonation on your strings after playing close to correctly in tune for a while.
19)People like paying for songs that make the violin sound like a violin.
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Replies (2)
Thank you for sharing. Some of it sounds very interesting.
1)It's possible to create a kind of accent…techniques I've discovered for myself.
This technique is called a “ghost note” in jazz violin. It creates a laid-back listening feel.
However, in jazz, a ghost note on the violin is usually played by drawing the bow very lightly before the finger fully stops the string, and only applying real pressure after the finger is down.When you mentioned a “twangy sound,” it seems more like the player is already applying force from the very moment the bow starts moving, Am I understanding this correctly?
3)If you practice the violin like a guitar…musicality to your playing.
That’s also one of the reasons I started learning the mandolin. Since it’s tuned the same as the violin and the fingerboard layout is very similar, violinists can usually pick it up quite quickly.
Playing the mandolin is truly a lot of fun. These days, I usually spend about 30 minutes practicing it every day.;-)