How To Hold The Violin With The Left Hand - (1 Easy Tip)
I'm going to be sharing my thoughts on how you can place your left hand on the violin, especially with how we can get the knuckles above the fingerboard and in the right placement, alongside the neck of the violin.
There are different methodologies and ideas as to how to put the left hand, close to the neck of the violin. I'm going to be exploring that with you. So follow along if you have your instrument. We're going to try doing this together.
First and foremost, we want to take a look at our hand. You know, every violinist or beginner student, whatever it may be, has a different size hand. However, there's a great outline in which we can kind of lay the neck of the violin next to our violin shelf (click on video above for visual)
So you might notice that over here, we have a bunch of different lines.
If you want to take a look at your own hand, that's, that's perfectly fine too. And I like to use this middle hand right over here. And this, when I follow this line all the way to the edge of the knuckle, this is ideally where we want to put that neck of the violin. I have a large hand, so it might be different for you and for somebody else.
That way you have a lot more control of your intonation. You'll have a lot more control of the finger placement. And if you haven't watched that video of fingertip placement, there will be a link below so you can click on that and get an idea of how to place a finger on the string.
Finger Tip Placement on the Fingerboard - https://youtu.be/XB86o6ETXiA
So again, you have this line, you put the neck right above this line, and then we are going to let that violin sit on the first knuckle.
Grab your violin and we're going to apply that line on your palm which I call the 'lifeline'. A student of mine actually explained this to me earlier. "Like, yeah, like, this is your, this is your lifeline, you know?" And I was like, "Oh, that's really cool." And I should do that with beginner students.
As a matter of fact, right before I made this video I had a couple of students that really helped them set up their left hand.
Another student was like, "What are you, a Palm reader? What is this nonsense?" So, so every student's going to react a different way, but anyways, we're going to apply that line.
Or if you had like a little marker, you could apply a little marker if you're a parent or a student, uh, and then you need something visual. I like to kind of put a little dot near the, um, near that little line. So that way the students. No, where to place that neck. So now here we go. We go into first position and I'm going to look at my little hand and you see that line over here.
(for the rest of the article I recommend going to the video above since everything I'm about to explain will help you visually)
And this is where the neck and the line kind of meet. And I'm going to go a little higher. Um, Right over here. And of course, this is different than having the violin down here. And this is where the problems begin. If you don't really take this into account that if the student goes down here, the students will have a tendency to go below the fingerboard, have all the knuckles below the fingerboard.
And of course we don't want that because it causes all sorts of problems such as when you start using fourth finger. Instead of going from top to bottom, you're going from the bottom up and that's going to cause a lot of strain and a lot of tension in your arm, in your Palm. And we don't want that. This is one way to go about, this is again to have that neck of the violin aligned with that little lifeline.
And all of a sudden I have a nice curvature. I can finally put all my fingers down on the fingerboard and I can achieve better intonation this way.
Speaking of intonation, if you haven't checked out my video on first position intonation, I'm going to leave another card right up here, and you can easily use this video in relation to that video because I go in depth in how I achieve good intonation in first position, especially if you're a beginner.
FIX YOUR INTONATION --> https://youtu.be/1sn_Em6ohdw
Let's go over the steps again, take your hand. See if you can find that little line in the middle of your Palm and see if you can determine where that line finishes in the Palm, and then you want the neck to be right up here and in demonstrating this on the violin, I want to, I'm going to look at my line, see where it lines up, and then I'm going to twist my wrist inside.
And then all of a sudden, my fingers. Are above the fingerboard. My knuckles are above the fingerboard and I have more control over everything I do over the fingerboard. It may take some time because you're, you're probably instilled in the beginning stages of how to hold the violin, how to make sure you have good posture, how to place the fingertip on the string.
This is just one out of. All the steps that you need to do to help you become a better violinist. If you're a teacher, I highly recommend you share this video with anybody who might need help with this.
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