I’ve heard professors say on multiple occasions that students are often two years behind in right hand skills compared to left hand skills when they get to college. I don’t have any evidence to back that up, but I believe it. Right hand technique makes or breaks the music, but it doesn’t show up in many method books. It’s easy to forget about the right hand when you’re spending so much time just trying to fix notes and rhythms.
(By the way, if you are looking for a method book that teaches right hand skills, Sound Innovations specifically addresses things like tone quality and different types of bow strokes. Like any method book, it isn’t perfect, but it does have exercises specifically dedicated to right hand development.)
In my classes, we work on right hand technique almost daily for at least the first half of the year. After that, we still come back to it regularly to review. Right hand technique covers a lot of territory, so there is plenty to work on.
Bow Hold and Right Hand Development
Bow hold exercises are not just for beginners! I do bow hold exercises with all of my classes at the beginning of the year. They need the reminders, and even more importantly, they need to keep refining and improving their bow hold. As we get into more complex music that requires more bow control, the bow hold they learned as beginners doesn’t cut it anymore. They have to have more flexibility, more strength, and more control.
We talk about how to set up a good bow hold and how each finger and each part of the hand has a job to do. For the first few weeks of the school year especially, we do strength and flexibility exercises for the right hand. Dr. Charles Laux has some great exercises on his website along with music that makes them more fun.
We also talk about the bow itself and how it works. We talk about how to find the balance point and why that’s important, as well as the shape of the bow and how the bow hair works and why we need to use rosin. (By the way, Anna Huthmaker created some interesting videos about the bow that I’ve used with my students.)
Tone Quality
Tone quality affects everything! If you aren’t talking about tone quality with your students, you need to start today. Poor tone quality can cause all sorts of problems, from bad intonation to rhythm errors. That might seem like an exaggeration, but I’m convinced it’s true. I’ve fixed a lot of problems in my orchestras just by fixing the tone quality. I’m always looking for new ways to practice good tone.
I’ve heard a lot of ways to teach students how to get a good sound. Some teachers have acronyms they use, like WASP or PAWS (weight, angle, speed, point of contact). Other teachers talk about lanes on the string between the bridge and the fingerboard, with the lane closest to the bridge being 1 or fortissimo and the the lane closest to the fingerboard being 5 or pianissimo. If you’re interested in some of these ideas, Dr. Laux has some great information and images on his website, and a quick search on “violin lanes” will bring up a lot of other sites and videos, too.
I’ve used all of these, but now I tend to keep things simple. Yes, we talk about all those things, but usually I teach my students by having them experiment. We try playing with tons of weight and not much speed, or vice versa. I have them play in different parts of the bow using different contact points on the string. Every instrument is unique and requires a different combination to get the best possible sound. Each student will have to figure out the best way to play his or her own instrument.
Once we’ve discussed ways to change the tone quality on the instrument and students have practiced getting different sounds, then we apply tone quality to everything. Learning a new bow stroke? We experiment with tone. Practicing dynamics? More discussion about tone. Doing a shifting exercise? We will absolutely talk about tone.
Dynamics and Articulations
I consider dynamics and articulations to be some of the more difficult skills to master on a string instrument. Even after almost 20 years of playing violin, I still find it challenging to play the dynamics and articulations exactly as they are notated in the music. It takes so much control.
Dynamics and articulations are crucial to playing something musically, so why not practice them as part of warmups? In my classes, we often do exercises that specifically work on dynamics and articulations in isolation.
When teaching students dynamics, they need to know more than just how to play loud and soft. They need practice in playing all levels of dynamics, from fortissimo to pianissimo and everything in between. They need to be able to transition gradually from one dynamic level to another, and they need to be able to transition suddenly. In my warmups book, I have a whole page of dynamic exercises that we can play either on open strings or with a scale or simple note pattern. Yes, you can just make these up, but I like to have them all written down so I don’t forget something or get stuck doing the same things over and over.
The same goes for articulations. If you only teach the students the articulations in the music they play, you might miss out on some of the less common articulations. If you treat them as a skill and systematically teach students what the symbols mean and how to play them, you won’t need to spend nearly as much time on them in your pieces, and students will probably play them better anyway.
Bow Control
When I talk about bow control, I’m referring to the ability to use a wide variety of bowing patterns, slurs, bow retakes, etc. Students should be able to play in any part of the bow, from the tip to the frog. They should be able to quickly recover their bow and move to a different part of the bow. All of that takes a lot of awareness and control, and that takes time to develop. Work on it in isolation as a warmup, when students can focus solely on their bow.
I have a lot of these bow control exercises in my warmups book, and I also use other resources to supplement what I have. Stringskills.com, for example, has a sheet of “Crucial Bowings” that is a great place to start.
Bow Strokes
Bow strokes might be the first thing you think of for right hand technique, but I put it last on purpose. Yes, bow strokes are important, but there is so much more that goes into good right hand technique. Until students have time to develop a strong bow hold and better bow control, I don’t bother trying to teach them any special bow strokes. Once my students have been playing for a couple of years and can demonstrate a detaché bow stroke with good tone, position, and control, then I go on and start teaching other bow strokes.
I start with the martelé bow stroke. I find it’s one of the most useful bow strokes and helps the students develop better strength and control in the right hand. I usually introduce this towards the beginning of the year with my high school students and reintroduce it every year as the students advance. Every year the goal is to refine the bow stroke and gain more control.
Once the students have mastered martelé, we move on to spiccato. Students won’t be able to do a good spiccato stroke without proper bow hold and a lot of flexibility in the hand, so I make sure we do a lot of those exercises first.
To help with a more flexible, controlled bow hold, I have my more advanced students learn the collé bow stroke. This bow stroke is rarely used in actual music, but it’s very good for refining the bow hold and improving right hand technique.
I also make sure to teach the louré or portato bow strokes, as well as chopping and ricochet, as needed. I don’t have a specific time to teach those bow strokes in my curriculum, but I do make sure we go over them at some point before my students graduate.
Whether you are new to the string world or a native string player, there are always terms that come up that you may not know or aren’t quite sure what they mean. ASTA’s Dictionary of Bowing and Pizzicato Terms is a great resource, as is Elizabeth Green’s Orchestral Bowings and Routines. I also love the String Technique channel on YouTube.
Right hand technique includes so many skills, and it takes a lot of time and attention to develop. Intentionally make it a part of your daily routine. You’ll be amazed at how much better your orchestras sound if you give them the tools they need and the time to practice them.