Advanced Approach to Violin Shifting - Part 1

Hi and welcome to VirtualSheetMusic.com's Meet the Expert. My name is William Fitzpatrick, and I am the Temianka professor of violin at the Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music which is located on the Campus of Chapman University in Orange, California. I'm as well Director of MusiShare in Irvine.

So let's a deeper look into shifting, shifting with the left hand. First of all, where does the shift originate from? Well, let's see. What are the possibilities? Does it originate from the finger, from the hand? What about the wrist? Or maybe these muscles, or maybe my elbow. Well, I am a firm believer that the gesture of the shift originates from the elbow. What if we were to consider a sport as a model for shifting? Suppose we were to consider baseball. Suppose we were to consider throwing a baseball.

Let's see, with my students, my younger students, we do a little thing. I take a piece of paper, and I roll it up. Now, my baseball. And what am I going to do? I'm going to throw it. Let's see. How would I throw my baseball, my piece of paper? I would go back and throw. Did you notice that my wrist went this way? Well, let's try this baseball thing again with my little piece of paper. Well, what would happen if I put it in my left hand, and I were to throw it over my shoulder? Let's see. Did you notice my hand went like this? How come? Well, because it was powered by my elbow, and my elbow allowed my wrist, my hand, my fingers to be free. No stress, no strain. I simply move my elbow just like a baseball player and there it is. Voila, a shift.

Now, let's look at that shift again with the violin up. It would mean I would be doing this. Can you see that? This. You see, my elbow, I'll do it from up here. It moves which moves the rest of my arm. Now, what does that sound like? Well, that sounds like this. [plays] To understand this better, I use Yost. Yost is a one octave scale, either a chromatic or just a normal scale.

Here, let me show you. Let's do a F major on the E string, one octave scale. [plays] Now the beauty of Yost is we can do it. What, like that? We can do it with our second finger, third, fourth, but if I really want to explore what the gesture is like, maybe I should just do an octave. [plays] That gets me to do that gesture. [plays] So are you seeing? Oh, and the Yost you could do thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths and, of course, what I just did, the octaves.

Okay, so we've explored the rudiments of what's going on. Let's be a little bit more specific. If you are playing a piece, there are basically two types of shifts. One would be going on the original finger, say, if I were going to my second finger. That's called fetch or Russian which would be going on a new finger. [plays] Russian. Now to use our shifts, we need to develop the ability to recognize what's happening in the shift that we've decided to do. So we have to really understand how to develop what I might call areas of awareness.

For example, we have to develop a kinesthetic sense, that meaning an understanding or evaluation of how far the distance of the shift is. For example, if I am going from [plays] I have to understand how far that is. Okay, then I need to understand what kind of release am I doing? Am I releasing the finger and then sliding? Or am I jumping? [plays] Well, I didn't jump, so now I know that I released the finger. But sometimes you might jump. Or what about the speed pattern? Let's see. Was it slow to fast? Or fast to slow? [plays] Well, unless I'm mistaken, I believe that was fast to slow, as it slowed down as it approached the note.

So understanding these areas of awareness, while they're of the utmost importance if we are going to be able to work on our shift, to be able to understand the choreography of what's surrounding that shift, this awareness will lead us to develop better practicing strategies to be able to try to ensure that we will not miss that shift. Well, that's it for Understanding Shifting, Part One. If you have a comment, question, or special request, please feel free to post them below. See you next time.

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