I've been playing piano for about three years now, however, my music teacher suggested I give violin a try too. (All the first violinists of the school orchestra are in their final year, meaning that the second violinists are moving up in about May, leaving a non-existent second violin section for next years orchestra...) I relucantly agreed to a few informal lessons with the school violin teacher, just to keep him happy, and not really expecting to enjoy it. But I loved it!
So now I'm taking weekly lessons in the hope of making second violin section in orchestra next year. My teacher says I'm progressing very quickly, but I'm having a few problems with bowing and using the fourth finger. I can't get my fourth finger to stretch far enough away from my third to reach anything more than about a semitone. It's very frustrating, especially when I have no problem with stretches on the piano! More frustrating is that when I bow, I just can't seem to keep the bow moving in a straight line. We've tried all sorts, bowing on the side of the ribbon, on the flat of the ribbon, bowing in front of a mirror, all sorts! I can just about keep it straight playing open strings slowly and concentrating very very VERY hard, but as soon as notes come in, I'm completely gone! Does anyone have any tips to help with either of these?

Your little finger will get stronger the more you use it!

Straight bowing...if you can do it on open strings that GREAT. Can you HEAR the better tone you get when you bow correctly? If you can then try and listen for this when you are playing - it's hard to do lots of things at once though so go easy on yourself. Also, when you are practising straight open string bowing, close your eyes once you have it correct and really try to 'feel' how your arm is moving, think elbow open/close with flexible wrist joint and NO upper arm swinging back allowed!

Good luck and well done for this!

the thing that helped me most with straight bowing was changing strings. the cheap strings that came on my first fiddle would sound the same no matter how you bowed them. after changing to Dominants, i had to actually do it properly or they sounded awful.

The fourth finger issue concerns me, primarily because I'm wondering what sort of position your left hand is in. Do not and I'll repeat that, DO NOT tip the palm of the hand upwards towards the neck of the violin - as though you were holding the handle of a frying pan. If you do, the stretch of your fingers will be severely limited and hence, the fourth finger will only reach (at a maximum) a semitone beyond your third finger.

The left hand should be at the same angle and in line with your forearm, ie. straight, and don't 'death grip' the neck of the violin between your thumb and forefinger as this also constricts movement. Additionally, the left elbow needs to be positioned slightly under the instrument, hanging relaxed almost, not jutting out to the laft hand side - or this also restricts left hand movement and fingers.

When it comes to straight bowing, it's all in the motion of the arm. The motion should begin first in the right hand fingers, followed by the wrist and then the elbow - an unfolding motion you could say. Don't saw at it from the shoulder as though you were cutting a block of wood - that's precisely when the bow starts going in all directions! The wrist should rise on an up bow and drop on a down bow. Also, bows themselves are surprisingly long things, so don't bow beyond the point where your arm is almost straight, otherwise the shoulder will start to drag the bow backwards creating a sawing motion.

Technique on the violin is all about suppleness and softness. Tone is mainly delivered from the bow arm, but sympathetic technique in the left hand will contribute to all round warmth in the sound. Don't panic if none of this appears to be working immediately, it will take years to develop a good tone, but the essential requirement to your learning at the moment is the best possible teacher who will teach the correct technique. All the musicality in the world will not help you succeed if your technique is still lacking.

Is the teacher you're having lessons with now a specialist violin teacher? From your post on here I gather not and if that's the case I would seriously advise you look for one, before you develop ingrained bad habits in your playing and find your progress grinding to a halt.

Give yourself some time!! So long as you continue to practice bowing exercises meticulously these things will come together. It is very hard to do several things at once and still remember to do them all well, so at this stage it would be usual to pick a study for bowing and a study for intonation and finger patterns and to concentrate on each one as a separate issue. When you get them both right they will come at the same time much more easily.

Check you don't have the violin too high on your shoulder. It's very common for people to stick them straight out sideways running in line with the shoulder. This angle, often combined with a shoulder rest that is too high, makes it much harder to bow straight, and it's best to correct errors before you get too attached to your playing position. I think I was a good couple of years in before I could be relied upon to bow straight when I was thinking about keys and fingers and counting and things too. When you are playing something that you are concentrating on the left hand fingers, at the end of each phrase of the music you could glance down and check and correct your bow position, particularly in rests or long notes where you can take your eyes off the music. Gives you time to concentrate on your notes but also keep the bow in check every now and then.

Fourth finger exercises will help your strength and stretch, but also to look at your wrist and elbow position. It's much hard to reach your 4th around if your elbow is not tucked properly, especially on the D and G strings, if your wrist is flattened or if you are leaving your thumb behind your fingers or if it's sticking up in the air. You need the correct curve in your whole arm to facilitate the best use of the 4th finger, but honestly when you first begin 4th finger work it's just one of those things that it feels alien and sounds scratchy. Listen carefully, is it really that your finger is placed too flat or is it because you can't press it down hard enough in this new position and the note is being strangled, so just sounds off for that reason instead?

Not sure what keys you have learned, but it might be useful to do some pieces in the flattened 4th finger position (Ab, Eb, etc.) to gain strength without the stretch. You'll probably find it's a combination of strength (comes with time) and arm position (comes with concentration and regular correction). Sounds like you are doing really well, 4th finger is genuinely tricky.

Thank you very much for all the replies!
AmandaL, my teacher is a professional violin teacher, she's a different teacher recommended by my school music teacher, sorry if I didn't quite manage to myself clear there! I watched myself in the mirror when playing, and my left elbow was jutting out to one side, yet when I asked my teacher about it, and we kept an eye on it during the lesson, I didn't do it during my actual lesson. As soon as I started to practice myself, I did the same thing again! How odd! So I will have to work hard to keep this in check...
Most of the pieces we have done so far are written in either C, D or G major, so no flats involved yet, I'm terrified for when all that starts, I know I'll just get so confused!

I'm confused now, Amanda. My teacher has taught me to lift my hand (and therefore my palm) upwards when I move across to the lower strings in order to improve my reach and stretch. I know that you're really experienced and know what you're talking about, but I'm confused that you seem to be saying the opposite to my teacher here. I don't have my violin on me because I'm at work, but I've just spent a while playing around on the window pole and I really do seem to need to lift my hand to reach across to the lower strings (or what would be the lower strings if it was a violin and not a window pole ). If I don't lift my hand upwards to move across, then my 3rd and 4th fingers seem to end up jammed together. Am I doing something totally weird/wrong? My 4th finger is generally okay stretch-wise unless I'm going straight from a flattened 1st finger or a low second finger (both of which I find a bit of a stretch and will go flat if I'm concentrating on something else) but I'm finding vibrato harder on my 4th finger compared to the others. I'm a bit lost with your frying pan analogy as well (which I know lots of people use, but it's always puzzled me) - I'm not sure how people normally hold frying pans, but I hold them from above and am struggling to translate this across to see if I'm doing it wrong on violin because the wrist and forearm positions are so totally different.

OK, I think your teacher and the PP are talking about motion in different directions. You do move your hand to get onto the lower strings, and I suppose it does go up a bit, but it should be moving as part of you bringing your elbow under towards your front, and then it goes up and over the fingerboard. The frying pan hand is when you bring your palm directly upward, parallel to the floor, so that it is touching the neck of the violin at the back of the fingerboard and is coming from underneath. I didn't think this was about how you hold a frying pan, it's that your hand itself makes the shape of a frying pan itself, i.e. flat with the fingers brought up around the edges. Does that make a bit more sense? Imagine you have to hold a tennis ball between the neck of the violin and your wrist all the time.

I admit I normally pick up my first finger if I am using a flattened first and a whole tone 4th. If I am doing vibrato on the 4th I will always put the 3rd finger directly behind it, so say I want to vib on an A I will shift the 3rd finger into a G# position to vib and then back down again onto the Gnatural when I need the 3rd finger for its own sake. Have you learned position shifts yet? Lengthy vibratos on the 4th finger become a much smaller issue when you can confidently shift to any position, as you just move the note to a stronger finger. Although it seems like your brains are going to fall out when you first learn different positions, in many ways they make the instrument much easier, as you can get rid of some awkward fingerings and string crossings.

Have in theory learnt up to 4th position but have only really used 1st and 3rd in pieces. Learnt higher positions in cello though. Not sure about shifting position to avoid 4th finger vibrato - I think my teacher might class it as cheating.

It would be cheating to do it in position-specific exercises, studies and strengthening work for the 4th finger, but in pieces the name of the game is to play to your strengths and those of the instrument wherever that is musically appropriate. In theory you could play whole pieces in 5th position rather than 1st but unless it's marked specifically then why would you? It's like a flautist using the alternative trill fingerings to play normal pieces.

What Amanda was describing was that your wrist/palm shouldn't be touching the violin. A lot of beginners (i did it too until i got lessons) bend their wrist towards the violin so that they're kinda 'holding' the neck in their palm and the inside of their wrist may be touching the body of the violin.
Though if you have a professional teacher i'm sure she'd have corrected that by now if you were doing it

I can see what you're getting at here. However, you've argued against yourself, although you weren't to know - I'm not sure whether you knew that I'm primarily a flautist. We don't use alternative trill fingerings to play normal pieces, except very rarely on exceptionally fast passages. On flute the trill fingerings aren't an equivalent alternative because they are out of tune (which doesn't notice quite so much on a trill) and don't have the same resonance as the 'normal' fingerings, which means that they generally sound odd if you use them anywhere apart from a trill. Some people are taught to use trill fingerings instead of normal ones to make things 'easier' (especially if they are taught by a generic woodwind teacher rather than a flute specialist) but it is unfortunately a sign of poor teaching and in fact makes things more difficult because of all the additional problems the trill fingering introduces. We do sometimes use alternative fingerings to improve intonation on ff or pp notes, but these are very rarely trill fingerings.


Thanks ffliwt. I'm pretty sure I don't do this because I'd have thought it would be physically impossible to play the violin with your palm holding the neck. I've never explicitly been taught violin hold though. The only hold related thing I've explicitly been taught is to move my hand upwards when reaching across to the lower strings (which is why Amanda saying not to move your palm upwards had me confused).

it is possible - this grip is particularly common among American old-time fiddlers. it's useless for classical violin though, because it seriously restricts the reach of your fingers (especially the fourth finger), and makes shifting much harder.

This is the bent wrist that i was describing
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2611/371640..._2e42308c4a.jpg

This is the right wrist
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~woonhyol/left_back.JPG

That first one looks incredibly uncomfortable and immobile. How on earth do they move their fingers quickly enough and shift?

You'd be amazed at how many traditional fiddlers play with that flattened wrist position.

It doesn't bother Liz Carroll who uses vibrato, shifts all over the place and plays with beautiful tone and dynamic - but I think that's just because she's an outstanding musician and manages to play like like inspite of a collapsed wrist, rather than because of it.

I can't see how your average fiddle player / violinist would be able to do everything they need to do with this wrist position - I certainly can't!

There's certainly an extent to which your body adapts to your instrument and technique. When I was at school I had an unfortunate scenario where over the summer holidays the fingerboard of my violin sank and sank. I had played every day for some number of hours but somehow not noticed the problem. When I went back to school my teacher asked me a few questions and we found out that my left hand was now significantly bigger than my right - it still is in fact. I guess if you persevere with an "impossible" position you will eventually stretch all the ligaments and tendons until they will wrap around that position. Some lucky people will never suffer any ill effect from that, others will. It's also a whole lot easier for a teacher if pupils have a similar technique, of course, as it's easier to figure out what to do about tricky pieces.

Yeah, I had the fight with the flattened wrist for quite a while, I was getting so stressed about it, at the start of every lesson my teacher would remind me, then it became before every piece...
Then, one lesson, she forgot to remind. She didn't mention it through the whole lesson, then, at the end of the lesson, burst out laughing, and told me that I'd spent the whole double lesson (one hour) playing with a straight wrist! Somehow, by forgetting about it, I had managed to overcome it, and it's never been a problem since, in fact, it hurts to play with a flattened wrist after a few minutes!

Still having the problem with the bowing though, it's getting slowly better, my violin teacher and music teacher both say they've noticed a slight improvement. I've been practicing it every day though, my arms hurt so much after a long practice session, but hey, it'll all be worth it in the end my cousins just started playing, so playing the teacher or "friend" part of duets with her out of her beginner book has brought my sight reading and the rhythm of the bowing on no end!