Playing In Tune 2: Preparing the hand

A more reliable and natural hand position

We’ve talked about learning to play in tune by understanding and using the relationships between fingers, rather than thinking about pitches individually, as if they live in a vacuum (or in an electronic tuner, or on little tapes across the fingerboard). In this article we’ll help your hand find a natural position from which you can play in tune more easily. If your hand is in an awkward position, intonation can be hit-or-miss because your hand won’t be comfortable or predictable.

One excellent recurring game/exercise to play, that will help set up and maintain a good position for your hand, is the Drumming exercise. This was discussed in detail in a previous post, along with a brief video that you can work with. By doing this warmup exercise regularly, your body teaches itself the best position for itself to play accurately and effortlessly. You start in an easy place, holding the violin like a guitar with your right hand, and place the neck of the violin into a relaxed left hand as explained in the earlier post. As you drum your fingers effortlessly in that position, you slowly bring the violin up to playing position with your right hand. Slowly, because this helps your wrist, elbow and shoulder learn to accommodate the hand with the drumming fingers, so it stays comfortable even in playing position. Sometimes just a 1/4” adjustment of one of these joints may be all that’s needed to make your position feel right.

By keeping the hand in a position where the fingers can tap down on the strings from above, and the finger is not trapped against the neck of the instrument, the fingers form an arc and land accurately on the strings. It’s what could be called “microballistics.” Your fingers, free to move from the base knuckle, find the trajectory that taps the string accurately, much the way a pianist can hit high notes without looking. If your finger is trapped and cannot move from the base knuckle, it has to bend and straighten and press into the string rather than tap onto it as in the drumming exercise. The result is that you never know where the finger will land.

Another great thing about the drumming exercise is that it teaches the fingers how easy it can be to play. Drumming your fingers on a table while waiting for someone to show up is so effortless that you can probably do it for a half hour, after which you will probably send an angry text and go home in a huff! The only difference between drumming fingers on a table and drumming on a fiddle is that the wrist is rotated so you can reach the strings. The effortlessness is still there, much to the envy of the fretted instrument players! And easy, effortless fingering makes it much easier to tap your fingers in predictable places.

As we discussed in the post about finger relationships, each finger generally is responsible for two positions, a high and a low position. Another earlier post, about body-mapping, pointed out how important it is to recognize that our left hand does not lie parallel to the neck of the violin. Our palm faces toward us. This allows fingers to reach high and low positions simply by straightening or bending. Notice that our fingers use different functions for different purposes — tapping the finger onto the string, or letting it spring up, is done with “microballistics” trajectories from the base knuckle of the finger. Straightening and bending the finger is for finding the high or low position for that finger on the string (F vs F#, for example). Check out the earlier post for more discussion of this.

Do you have trouble reaching the 4th finger? Here’s a little experiment that can help you find a hand position allowing you to reach all the notes. On one string, bow 0, 1, 2, 3, and then all 4 fingers. Keep them all down and notice your hand position. (Sometimes people change their hand position to reach for that fourth finger.) Now keep that exact hand position intact (never mind intonation at this point!), and play your way down the string — simply lift the fourth finger, then the third and then the second. If you leave your hand in the position that allowed you to play your 4th finger, you can play any note you want just by tapping a finger, without having to twist or shift your hand into a new position just to reach one or another finger. Those who tend to adjust their hand position to reach the 4th finger have to remember to recover their original position when moving to their next note, or else that 4th finger will drag all the other notes out of tune. It can be an awkward mess! It’s way better to find a position that lets you play all the notes, and this experiment, which is well worth checking into regularly, of playing 0,1,2,3,4, then leaving the hand in the same position as you play 4,3,2,1,0, can really help establish a new muscle memory for a way to reliably reach all the notes — and as a result, have a much easier time play in tune.

We’ve talked about becoming aware of finger relationships — where and when a pair of fingertips are touching or a finger’s width apart. Above, we’ve been discussing ways to make your hand more reliable so that you can predictably play in tune. In another post, I’ll suggest some exercises specifically for improving your intonation.

In the meantime, remember: the more you play, the better you get! And the more mindfully you play, the faster you get better. Enjoy your music!