Day 19

Today was the last day of my winter break, but I put it to good use for my violin practice:) (both the break and the day:) ).

I had a vibrato breakthrough today. I tried to figure out how good violinists can do a wide vibrato with such a small motion. What they all have in common is the efficient use of the fingertip, and I remembered Simon Fischer's remark that “all vibrato is a finger vibrato.” So, instead of initializing my vibrato from the wrist with my usual “wrist vibrato,” I tried to initialize it only by using muscles on the finger. And yes, you can do it! But the finger attached to the hand. So it moves your hand (and it looks almost like you are doing the wrist vibrato, but with a smaller motion). If you do not help your finger vibrato with your wrist, your finger must apply too much force with your finger muscles. And the hand is attached to the arm, and if you want to get your wrist vibrato more efficiently, you can help it with the arm. I even tried to check if I could do a “shoulder vibrato,” and yes, you can! And the most efficient way is when all muscles work together in unison.

Using this idea, I could do a wide vibrato through several bow changes and feel less tired after that! I spent approximately 40 minutes maintaining vibrato on different fingers (and it was even working for the fourth one!) I could not yet keep wide vibrato if it is faster than four beats per second, but this is a good start!

After a break, I decided to do the next page of Heley’s book. I enjoy how well this book is structured. Each page consists of ten exercises and one small piece. Doing one page did not seem to be much work for me, but suddenly I got stuck on exercises three and four:

Keeping the correct rhythm and bow distribution was not that easy! I had to use the metronome to count. And this overwhelmed my “juggling” ability, and my tone and intonation suffered because of that.

I firmly believe that if you know that you can make a better sound (but you do not), you have to figure out how to do it. After all, everyone wants to play the violin because it can sound so beautiful :)). I spent at least 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get a good sound on these two exercises (I also recorded myself after each attempt)! Fortunately, the rest of the page was not that tricky (but I stopped video recording to finish before my time and patience ran out:) ).