Playing in Tune 3

Teaching your fingers their job!

Thank you to many of you for participating in the poll last week, some of you also adding more nuanced answers by email. You can see the results here. Basically, 35% were interested in articles about playing with or for others (i.e. sessions and performances); 24% in technique (our topic today!); 20% about improving musicality; and 20% (10% each) interested in articles about music in nature, and the impact of music on our bodies and brains.

So happy to see interest across the board! We’ll be addressing these topics today and in upcoming posts. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading. If you weren’t here, I’d be talking to myself, and that wouldn’t look good! Always feel free to leave a comment, a like, or respond by email with your thoughts. If you have the Substack app (also possible online), you can also click on “Chat” and add your thoughts there where you’ll see my invitation to you to comment if you like.

---

In two recent articles about playing in tune, we talked first about how intonation is about finger relationships, rather than about learning isolated “correct” positions for each note; and we talked about ways to improve your hand position so you can play more accurately and effortlessly.

There are many practical games/exercises to build good intonation into your hands and ears. Your brain can help understand the note patterns, but it can’t simply tell your fingers what to do; you need to build those understandings into your ears and physically into your muscle memory. For each new movement or technique, it’s worth remembering that it’s never enough to merely understand it — your muscles have to become comfortable with it in order to rely on them. This may not take a long time, though. Often, doing something 3 times in a row can be enough to teach the muscles initially. Coming back to it, and being as consistent as you can, will integrate it into how you play, whether it’s a bowing or fingering idea.

You may find it especially helpful to work with the video at the bottom of this article.

The Lo-Hi Scale

Sometimes people will look at the fretless fingerboard of a violin and imagine that there are infinite places for fingers to go, and most of them wrong! But in fact, each finger has only two positions to cover — low and high — and they are essentially a finger’s width apart. Technically, there are more positions, since we often lean high or low to make sounds we like in different keys or in different fiddle styles, but the two basic positions are the foundation of playing in tune.

The “Lo-Hi Scale” gives each finger a feel for the low and high positions it’s responsible for.

1. Start by bowing an open string. Get a good solid sound and play in time; as with the Long Bows exercise, you might stick with 4 counts per bow, maybe about one second per count. Halfway through the bow, tap your first finger down right near the nut (the strip of wood that the strings rest on before heading into the pegbox). If you have a Finger Finder, this position is represented by the first circle on each string.

You just played open string (0), and Low 1. Use half a bow on 0, and half on Low 1, so your ears can have time to hear and compare the notes. Try it both downbow and upbow.

2. Now play 0 and then High 1 — tapping the 1st finger down one finger’s width beyond the Low 1 (the next circle on the Finger Finder). Play 0 and High 1 again, in good time, so your ears can hear the two pitches clearly.

Keep in mind that you are not just playing notes — you’re keeping a steady sound and playing in time. Give your ears and fingers a chance to compare the open string with low first finger, as opposed to open string with the high first finger position. Don’t rush it, it’s not about intellectually understanding, but allowing your ears and fingers to get comfortable with the sounds and feel of the notes.

Using a device like an electronic tuner can be a good test — once or twice — but don’t rely on it. Kind of like depending on GPS to go somewhere, it discourages you from noticing landmarks or trusting your own orientation to get you there. Practicing this low-high scale is about teaching yourself to trust your ears and fingers. In the end, it’s more reliable and quicker to learn intonation this way than with aids such as little strips of tape across the fingerboard. Some of those tapes are different colors — as if your eyes can actually see them very well from the weird angle at the end of the violin! Since we don’t actually play the fiddle with our eyes, it’s always best to teach and rely on your ears and the muscle memory of the fingers and hands to do their jobs, without letting the eyes barge in and crash the party!

3. Once you’ve played 0-Low 1 a couple times and moved on to play 0-High 1, keep your first finger down on the string in the High position (you’ve earned it!), and do the same thing with the 2d finger — play 1, Low 2 a couple of times, and then 1-High 2 (tapping the 2d finger a whole finger’s width away from the 1st finger. There’s very much a physical aspect to all of this. The Low 2 position requires the 2d fingertip to physically squeeze down alongside the 1st finger. It’s best to leave the 1st finger down as your anchor; lifting and replacing it is extra work and leaves your 2d finger to shoot in the dark. Half the time you’ll need the first finger soon anyway, so it’s great to leave it there whenever you can. (When players are very comfortable with finger relationships, there are times when they might want to use one finger at a time, depending on what note patterns they’re playing and whether they’re using vibrato.)

That’s the heart of the exercise — your first finger is the anchor for the others, and the second finger guides the third, so if you get a clear sense of the first two fingers, you’re in good shape. Go on and do it with your 3d finger too — leave two fingers down and play 2, Low-3 a couple of times, and then 2, High-3 and repeat, as with the others. A few times on these patterns will do a lot for your muscle memory; try it every time you play. It’ll cost you less than 30 seconds.

Keep in mind that tapping fingers into place is like shooting an arrow into a target. If you get it wrong, try again. If you shoot an arrow and miss the center of the target, you would never walk over and try to drag it onto the bullseye — you’d just shoot again. In the same way, if you come down a little out of tune, don’t slide into the right pitch after you’ve played it — your finger will never learn the right place to land that way. Just aim better next time!

About the video below

Sometimes working with a brief video guides us through an important and helpful game/exercise like The Lo-Hi Scale, while being reminded as we go through it how best to think about it. This exercise opens up lots of possibilities and benefits the more you do it.

The video below is #10 in Technique Video Group 1 on my site fiddle-online.com. Out of respect for those who pay a small fee to access these videos on that site, and out of appreciation for those who are paid subscribers here, this video is only available to paid subscribers.