I guess this is probably a piece of string question, but perhaps some personal experiences would help. I recently changed my viola hold quite significantly after reading a lot of articles about shoulder-rests and chinrests and things. I've brought it down a lot and changed the angle, both arms are approaching differently to the instrument in terms of angle, I need to find my positions again at the new angle, and my arm gets really tired really fast holding in a new place. It's going to be for long-term gain, as my rest was way, way too high, but in this short term I am feeling a bit like I am never going to be able to stop skittering the bow about and missing position changes. And that my arm will fall off! I didn't expect this to matter so quickly as I was working towards the Diploma (teaching) and that's a long way off, plus the experience of changing would give me something really useful to talk about in the exam for pupils who pick up bad habits. Sadly I have now found I may have to do an audition in the next few weeks, and I am pretty terrified!! It doens't sound great to turn up and say sorry I sound like a distressed cat, I'm in the middle of shifting my posture. I am too far down the new road to just crank the shoulder-rest back up for the audition as I can't play like that either!!

Would really appreciate some experiences from anyone who's done this.

Hi, I don't know about a general answer as it probably depends so much on individual variations, but I recently went through a similar process and I found it took at least a week - ten days to feel comfortable. I suppose it depends partly on your reasons for changing your set up.

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