(for bowing wrist)
While holding just your bow (no violin) with “Classic” grip in front of you, make the bow vertical. Slowly raise and lower the bow keeping it vertical as you do it.
Watch the mechanics of your wrist while the bow goes high and low being kept vertical. You might benefit watching this in a mirror.
Close your eyes while raising and lowering the bow vertical several times (periodically stealing a peak in a mirror to keep yourself in form if you need to).
What does all this feel like in your wrist?
2) (for the small muscles in bowing hand, to remind them that they exist and have a job to do.)
While holding just your bow (no violin) with “Classic” grip in front of you, pretend your bow is the windshield wiper on your car. Do it several times back and forth, but not too many at first.
3) (for fiddle wrist, hand, elbow, and arm.)
Pretend you’re playing your violin with the hand you normally play it with leading with your pinky finger.
Now SLOWLY unwind the arm and hand in the opposite direction leading with the pinky finger to as far as you can get it to go in that opposite direction. (The arm will straighten out as you attempt this.)
Hold it there just long enough to get a good stretch (all the way out the pinky finger) and then slowly rewind your arm and hand back into fiddle playing position leading with your pinky finger.
Slowly try this several times.
Is your fiddle wrist, hand, elbow, and arm more willing to into fiddle position after stretching it in the opposite direction?
NOTE: this exercise can also be done with both arms to help maintain the body’s symmetry.
I’m going to try the bow tips, as I have been doing it another way in preperation for fingering. Closing my eyes and trying to find the right placements on the strings, all while keeping a violin balanced, me balanced, and comfortable. It is DAMN HARD.
I think getting a good ‘feel’ for everyone inch of this instrument is serving me better than playing a song, at the moment.
Do you have tips for fingering practice? My weakness is relaxation and my little pinky finger. My wrist begins to become sore after a while, but this goes away quickly.
I have great respect for yourself and your knowledge of many interesting things but I have to take you to task here.
In my experienced opinion, there is no point whatever in playing around with the bow on it’s own. It needs to be close to the fiddle at every time.
One goes with the other. The bow without the fiddle is no better than a fly swatter and vice versa.
In the early days there will be the odd ache and cramp here and there but that is perfectly normal and expected. It ain’t no big deal, it’s just what happens to those who start playing fiddle.
The only advice I would give to a newbie is to keep the left wrist at a right - ish angle to the neck and keep the bow around ninety degrees to the strings - and halfway betwixt the bridge and the end of the fingerboard.
After that it’s down to practice, study and more practice.
That’s how it starts, where it ends is down to the fiddler.
The wrist/hand/elbow/arm twisting exercise was to warm/loosen up the muscles that twist into fiddle playing position.
Try playing as if you are always going to use that pinky. Learn to keep it in position for action.
Another exercise (silently on the violin) is to try to see if you can use each finger one of a time.
A goal in that exercise is to get to where you don’t lift the fingers you aren’t using very far from the strings when not in use.
In a big percentage of the human population the pinky finger and the ring finger share a tendon. It might take a bit of practice teach them to work on their own, but it can be done.
Relaxation is the word used when explaining things but its in comparison to having the muscles tensed up.
There are some exercises Aikido students use to recognize the spectrum from tense to flaccid.
When you get to flaccid there isn’t any usable energy.
Lets think “tonus” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_tone
If you’ve got the fingers curled over the strings you can afford an economy of action. The strings are under your fingers. The touch is more of just a touch, not a press.
Remember those scenes in “the Karate Kid” where Mr. Miyagi has Daniel doing mundane things to prepare him for movements he’ll eventually do in Karate?
A lot of things are thrown at a beginning fiddle/violin student at the same time. The exercises were meant to isolate and become familiar with some of the muscles used.
Sorry, mate, got to go with hyldemoer on this one. Those are all very useful exercises, and conform pretty closely with the ones that James Kelly himself recommends. I use, in particular, the vertical one with my students to do exactly what hyldemoer suggests: to show the student what the weight of the bow should feel like in the hand when playing. The vertical position of the bow in the exercise puts the whole weight of the bow in your grip, helping you to feel and respond to the intertia of moving that small weight efficiently, in a linear fashion. The other exercises are good as well; I would add drawing small, then large, circles in the air in front of you with the bow-tip, using only the fingers of the bow-hand. Nothing wrong with bow calisthenics! Cheers,
Don’t they encourage the Suzuki kids to walk around with their violin tucked under their chin as a practice technique?
If you can do that, the subject of supporting the violin with your playing hand just doesn’t come up.
If you can’t do that, its not a problem to adjust the ergonomics of a violin with a shoulder rest of some sort.
One of the problems I found with shoulder rests is that they tend to allow me to almost glue the fiddle to my body.
Ideally I like my interaction with the fiddle to be more fluid than that.
In the end, I always use one but I try not to take it serious.
Right, me too.
Occasionally I hang on with just my chin because I need to use my left hand for something. I don’t do that much because of that nasty feeling that that’s the moment the chin rest will decide to fall off, and the 150 year old (venerable, and I’m fond of it, but otherwise not all that great) fiddle will hit the floor.
