Warmups for Orchestra Part 4: Left-Hand Technique

Left-hand skills are the ones generally covered in method books, so it’s likely you are already teaching most if not all of these skills in your classes. Still, left-hand technique covers a lot of ground, so it’s good to take a step back every so often and think about what your students need right now. 

Position

I’m an advocate of constantly reviewing and refining the basics, even with my most advanced students. I try to review playing position regularly with my students, and I try to always be on the alert for bad habits that sneak in when students get lazy. Besides avoiding bad habits, going over position regularly helps students refine their technique. They learn where to position their elbow for different strings and positions, how to change their hand frame for the higher positions, and how to stay relaxed and avoid injuries. 

I also go over hand frame and finger patterns regularly with my students. We spend a lot of time teaching and reviewing finger patterns and scales. I know there are lots of systems for teaching finger patterns and hand frames out there, but I particularly like Barbara Barber’s system from her book Fingerboard Geography. I like her color system for naming the patterns and her book has a lot of exercises for training students to use different finger patterns. 

Intonation

I try to include some sort of intonation exercises in my orchestras’ warmups almost daily. Intonation is a huge topic, however, and I’ve already written a whole series of posts about all the aspects of teaching students to play in tune and some of my favorite exercises. Please see my other posts on intonation for more information.

Finger Facility (i.e. Playing Fast)

I distinctly remember the first time my private teacher gave me a really fast piece to play. After trying to play it for a few weeks, I told her that I wanted to specialize in playing slow music. Now that I’m a teacher, many of my students share that opinion. Honestly, most of the music we play in class doesn’t require students to play a lot of really fast passages, so when we do run into something truly fast, my students have a hard time with it. If you are a TwoSet Violin fan, you’ve probably heard them make fun of the idea that “if you can play something slowly, then you can play it quickly.” Yes, I’m a strong advocate for playing things slowly. I also believe that playing fast is a skill on its own and must be practiced. We play scales at increasingly fast tempos. You can incorporate other exercises as well.

Shifting

String players have to shift. There’s no way around it. If we wait until shifting comes up in the repertoire to teach students how to shift, they will not do very well. Shifting exercises need to be built into the warmup routine starting from early on and continue all the way through high school. In my classes we do at least one or two shifting exercises every day. 

Don’t just stop with third position! Students should become comfortable with position 1-5 at the very least, and by the end of high school I try to get my students shifting higher than that. I especially try to give them exercises in 2nd and 4th positions, because those positions often get neglected for violin and viola and yet can be incredibly useful.

I have used several method books for shifting. Right now I use the Essential Technique and Advanced Technique books from the Essential Elements series. I like those books mainly because of the number of exercises they contain. They give the students lots of practice in all positions, 1-5. 

In my experience, many method books simply don’t have enough exercises to get students truly comfortable in the different positions. That being said, I’ve used a lot of different books and you may find another book that better fits the needs of your classes. Many teachers like the Habits of a Successful String Musician book and the Sound Innovations books. Samuel Applebaum has a whole series of method books to practice the different positions, although they are older and not as useful in heterogeneous classes. I’ve used them to supplement our warmups sometimes.

Not many method books teach shifting above 5th position, but I do think it’s good for more advanced students to practice in those higher positions. To supplement our exercises for my more advanced students, I will sometimes use the Tunes for Shifting on stringskills.com. 

Vibrato

My first private teacher never taught me how to do vibrato, so I didn’t learn vibrato until my junior year of high school. It was a long, arduous process for me and I hated it. That might be why I didn’t even try to teach vibrato to my orchestra students for the first three or four years that I taught. My first attempts at teaching vibrato were pretty haphazard – and mostly unsuccessful. Luckily I learned from some other smart teachers and now have a system that works for almost all of my students. 

I’m not going to get into all the exercises that we do here (that may be a post in the near future.) I will say this: Don’t start too early and don’t be in a rush.

Students aren’t ready to learn vibrato until they have a solid foundation of good position, hand frame, tone quality, and intonation. I would probably recommend waiting until at least their third year of playing to start vibrato exercises and maybe even a little longer for some students. I believe waiting too long is less of a problem than not waiting long enough.

Vibrato takes time to develop and master. Good vibrato should be controlled; students should be able to turn vibrato on and off and control the speed and width of their vibrato. That takes time – a lot of time. I start vibrato exercises with my sophomores about halfway through the school year. By the time they are seniors, almost all of my students have a beautiful, relaxed, controlled vibrato. It takes small, daily exercises to develop the muscles and hone the control. 

When planning out warmups for your classes, think about what your students need right now but also look ahead to what you want them to be able to do in the future. This is especially important for left-hand technique. Don’t wait until your students have to shift into 5th position to teach them that. Build it into your warmups well in advance and your students will have no problem with it when those things come up.