Violin Video Lesson: What I Teach: Getting Your Bow to the String

So we talk a lot about what we do when we play, but suppose we were to talk about what happens before we play.

What happens before we get there? I mean, couldn't what we do with our bow to get to the string have a real impact on what happens when we finally get to the string and start playing those notes? You see, today's violinists move around a lot. Bows go everywhere, and that's cool.

But what does all that movement actually do for the music? Does it change anything? Help anything? Well, I used to think all this moving around was just for show until one day I realized that the way we move with the bow before we play could actually have an impact. That it could affect the sound we produce when the bow finally gets to the string.

That realization got me speculating, experimenting, and it led me to rethink a movement we call figure eights.

So you might have heard of figure eights before.

It's that circular bowing motion that looks like a flattened out figure eight.

A lot of violinists have used it to help smooth out bow changes.

But my experimenting got me looking at it from a different angle.

Here's a figure eight to help visualize this redesigned path.

And while we're at it, maybe we can get Professor Fitzpatrick to slow it down a bit.

That should make it even easier to see and follow.

The possibilities this new path opened up were amazing.

For example, what if the speed we use to approach the string is the same speed we keep when the bow makes contact with the string? Doing this would mean that what we do before the note actually determines the bow speed when we arrive.

Because of that, we can predict the sound we're about to make through the speed of the trajectory we've chosen to get to the string, and not just start everything once we arrive at the string.

What if all that connects to how we're holding the bow? And what if, before we start our trajectory to the string, we point the bow upwards towards the ceiling? Well, doing this takes a lot of weight off the fingers, and because of that, we don't have to press with the pinky to keep the bow balanced while hovering above the strings.

Starting from this position allows our fingers to be free.

Free to move, and free to arrange themselves in ways that realize the sounds you have in your head for what you are about to play.

You see, I think every bow hold produces a different quality of sound, and I also think a really good violinist needs to be able to create lots of different sounds, maybe 50, maybe 100. You see, a lot.

Thinking this way, how many bow holds does a violinist need to have to be really good? Well, your math is probably better than mine, so I'll let you figure that out.

But seriously, can you actually see really good violins doing figure eights when they play? It's not obvious.

What happens is that the figure eight gets reduced, flattened, like this. But if you look closely and use your imagination, what's seemingly invisible to the eye, well, I think you get what I mean.

So the next time you're about to start playing, remember, it's not just about what happens when you put your bow on the string.

It's about all the things you can do before you get there. That said, there's something you need to be careful about. There are no perfectly shaped cookie cutter ways of doing this. You have to experiment.

Experiment.

Experiment and find your way.

Why? Because we're all different, and everyone's not going to do it the way Professor Fitzpatrick does.

And you know what? That's a good thing.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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