The ability to find a great fingering for strings is perhaps one of the most under taught skills in string playing. I’ve found that many of us – even native string players who have studied our instruments for years – were never taught the basics of fingering.
This was the case for me. For ten years of private lessons, my teachers either just wrote in fingerings for me or handed me a copy of their music with their fingerings that I then painstakingly wrote into my own part. It wasn’t until my third year of college that anyone even suggested I come up with my own fingerings, and even then it was only in one or two isolated situations. It never came up in any of the pedagogy classes I took. In the dozens of music-teaching conferences I’ve been to, I’ve never seen a single session on it.
What’s more, I don’t think my experience is unique. I have played in several orchestras with some highly qualified musicians. Many of them are easily better players than I am, and yet time and time again I have watched them struggle to come up with an efficient, effective fingering. Just a few months ago, my stand partner was struggling with a fast passage and commented on how awkward it was to play. I glanced at it and suggested she play it in 6th position. She tried it and was amazed to see that what she had just practiced for the last five minutes without success, she was immediately able to play perfectly just by changing the position and leaving out the extra shifts. She turned to me and said, “Where did you learn to do that? Is there some sort of method book for fingering?” Unfortunately, no, I haven’t found a method book for fingering. I have, however, figured out some basic guidelines that can make fingerings much easier.
The Benefits of Finding a Good Fingering
A good fingering can immediately fix a host of problems that would be difficult (and in some cases, impossible) to fix otherwise. Many school orchestra teachers either rely on the printed music for fingerings or the students who are taking private lessons. I know I have done both. We hope that the editor would be so kind as to mark all the shifts and tricky fingerings for us. Luckily, many of the beginning and intermediate pieces are marked like that. After about grade 3, however, most of those fingerings disappear. If there are fingerings written in, they are often clumsy and inaccurate. Of course, that is right when shifting starts becoming more difficult and extensive. If we aren’t familiar enough with fingering on all the instruments, that’s when we turn to our more advanced students. While there is nothing wrong with that, I have found that even advanced students tend to stick with the fingerings they are most comfortable with. They will often go with a fingering in a position they are most comfortable with, even if there’s a better option.
There are three areas where a good fingering can make a huge difference: speed, intonation, and musicality. If your students struggle to get a passage up to tempo and constantly fumble over the shifting, there is probably a better way to finger it. If a passage is consistently out of tune, a different fingering may immediately solve that problem. Lastly, fingering can make a huge difference in the timbre of the sound. If you choose the right fingering, you can add a whole new layer of musicality to your orchestra’s performance.
This may sound complex and subjective. The good news is that the basic guidelines of fingering aren’t all that difficult to master as long as you’re willing to put in a little time and effort.
Basic Fingering Guidelines:
- Avoid unnecessary string crossings. I put this first because it seems to be the one that comes up most with my students. They would much rather cross strings in the middle of a fast passage than shift up into a position where they could play the whole passage without crossing strings. This is especially important if you only have to cross strings for one or two notes before moving back to the original string. String crossings slow you down and can be messy. Much better to simply shift up.
- Avoid blatant open strings. I say “blatant” because not all open strings are bad. Sometimes open strings are necessary and desirable, so please don’t tell your students to always avoid them. That being said, open strings have a much different timbre than fingered notes, and some open strings stick out more than others. The open E on violin can be especially bright and sometimes tinny. The open A on viola is almost always significantly brighter than the rest of the instrument. You also cannot vibrato an open string. For those reasons, I have my students shift to avoid playing open strings for long notes.
- Avoid unnecessary shifts. Every shift you add to a piece of music adds another layer of difficulty. Try to shift to a position where you can stay for a while. Students tend to shift up only long enough to hit the high notes and then shift back down into the lower positions where they are more comfortable, but that extra shifting often creates more problems, especially in fast passages.
- Choose a fingering that facilitates intonation and speed. We all have physical limitations that we have to work around. For example, everyone has a weak pinky finger. The fourth finger is shorter and will always be weaker and less flexible than the other fingers. In some passages, that physical weakness makes it extra difficult to play in tune. Instead of spending extra time insisting that the students just need to stretch a little farther or “listen” better – which most likely will result in frustrated teachers and students without actually fixing anything – why not find a fingering where you can play to your strengths? Intonation is always my first priority in choosing a fingering. I try to come up with a fingering where my students are most likely to play in tune.
- Choose a fingering for the best sound. This is one of the aspects of string playing that makes it so nuanced and unique from any other instrument. We have so many options with the sound and timbre that we get out of our instruments. A fingered E sounds significantly different from an open E. Playing a passage solely on the G string sounds much deeper and rougher than it would crossing over to the other strings. We have this amazing ability to choose the timbre that best fits the music. Even young players can start to hear those differences and make those decisions.
- Utilize the middle positions! I can’t tell you how many violin and viola players have told me how much they hate 2nd and 4th positions, students and colleagues alike. Cellists don’t seem to mind them as much, and bassists just do whatever they have to do to hit the notes, but upper strings often avoid those middle positions or don’t even consider them an option. Whether it’s because those positions are harder to find accurately or because the lines and spaces in the music don’t line up with the fingers we’ve come to expect or some other reason, we need to get over our bias towards the middle positions. They are extremely useful, especially in flat keys or even C major. I’ve often found passages that are very awkward to play in 1st and 3rd but become very simple in 2nd or 4th. I make sure my students become comfortable in all positions.
Fingering is not an exact science, and maybe that’s why it’s so much easier for us to ignore them or hope our students can just “figure it out.” Understanding these guidelines, however, can give us confidence that our choices make sense – and that we’ll end up with a more musically satisfying performance.