The best laid plans

To make a long story short, I just finished a penmanship lesson with my daughter, who convinced me that her ‘cold’ was worthy of a day away from school. Needless to say, it doesn’t mean we sit around in front of a tv all day. After I get this little note off to you we’ll turn our attention to reading.

My practice session will have to wait.

Here’s the deal with trills. I believe that the ultimate speed at which you are able to trill, is determined by God.

Yet even more importantly – the Clarity, and ultimately the effectiveness of our trill, is completely up to you.

There are people of course who, when you say ‘trill’, give the impression someone just pressed a doorbell. It’s that fast and effortless.

Yet these players often have the challenge of getting control or variability to it – a blazingly fast trill can be out of character in some music – a Mozart Andante being one good example.

Most of us are faced with the opposite problem, namely how to develop the finger reflex we’ve been given to convey an impression of something more.

There are two things that enable you to do this – technique and smart planning.

On the technical side you must resist the urge to press the vibrato into service in an attempt to amplify the finger’s natural reflex. Invariably the result of this will be a muddy, featureless blur. I can guarantee, no one is going to be fooled or impressed.

The best approach is always to stay with the finger – keeping it as light and clean as it can possibly be. The more relaxed you are, the better the result.

What you CAN do, after you’ve isolated the finger motion to a high degree, is experiment with the height you take it above the string. Yet in doing so you must remember to keep the hand relaxed, otherwise it will revert back into a knot of frustration.

The other side of the trill coin involves planning.

If you focus on a given pre-determined of oscillations for the trill – assuming it’s duration is a beat or less, and allow yourself to visualize the entire event each time you arrive to it, you may find yourself ‘tricking’ your finger into doing more than you thought possible.

Yes, this requires patience, relaxation and focus, yet I’m constantly surprised by the results I get from doing just this.

There are countless etudes and studies devoted to trills. Yet none are more enjoyable and satisfying than those found in Kreutzer. In volume 2 of ‘Kreutzer for Violin Mastery’ I take you through all manner of possibilities – measured, unmeasured, prepared, with terminations and without terminations.

Invariably, some players believe in practicing trills using various rhythms. I haven’t mentioned this here because I don’t feel they really produce the results I’m after. Kreutzer does.

Though challenging indeed, these Kreutzer etudes can really clean and polish a trill beautifully.

Clayton Haslop is the Concertmaster on many Hollywood movie soundtracks including The Matrix movies, Titanic, Avatar, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Star Trek, Up, Jurassic Park, Apollo- and The Perfect Storm. Clayton Haslop’s bestselling Instructional DVD courses are used by beginning violinists to professionals worldwide.

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Most violinists have four main challenges when it comes to their bow-arm; keeping it straight, keeping it horizontal, achieving clean, non-disruptive string crossings, and coordinating changes of string and direction with the left hand.

Now, you may disagree with me. You may be thinking, “my biggest problem is with spiccato or martel – I can do all those other things.”

If that’s the case, I’d say, you’d be wise to pay attention – your spiccato challenges may have more to do with these things than you may realize.

Actually today I’m just going to discuss the first two challenges – keeping the bow straight and keeping it horizontal. For most of us ‘straight’ is pretty well understood to mean parallel to the bridge. What is less understood, in my experience, is the need for the components of the bow arm to facilitate the horizontal travel of the bow.

And for these to happen there are exactly 3 joints you have that must ALLOW them to happen – the wrist, the elbow and the shoulder.

Take the wrist – one of the most common no-nos I see is the RAISING of the wrist at the frog. Raising the wrist immediately takes one component of your bow-arm out of that horizontal plane of movement so necessary to an efficient, seamless bow arm.

So how should the wrist flex? The wrist must flex forward, remaining within the ‘plane of motion’ the bow arm inhabits whilst also maintaining the bow in a position parallel to the bridge.

This idea of staying in the plane of motion extends to the elbow as well. I see a lot of players introducing unnecessary complications to their bow-arm by elevating and lowering the elbow in the course of drawing a full bow.

Well, there’s just too much going on, and all that contrary energy is getting fed right into the bow stick.

And last, there’s the shoulder. Oh yea, the shoulder. How fresh is the memory of my father standing next to me tapping my shoulder to get it to relax during my early years of practice.

Though relaxed, the muscles in the shoulder must nonetheless control critical movements of the upper arm that come into play at the lower extremes of the bow and during string crossings.

I’ll talk more about string crossings tomorrow, yet for now it is important to understand that, although the shoulder is bearing the weight of the arm and bow, it must nonetheless be relaxed, since it plays a critical role in moving the bow straight and horizontally at the frog.

One cannot confuse the vertical movements involved in string crossings with the lateral movements of the upper arm involved in bowing. They are two different and independent movements of the upper arm.

This morning I again made a worthwhile investment into my practice by playing Kreutzer #2 at the extreme frog. And you might be interested to know that for me to accomplish it, at tempo from top to bottom with a really smooth detach bowing, I ‘belly-breathed’ like a stallion in heat. You see, you’ve got to keep the upper body absolutely relaxed to do play cleanly this way, and belly-breathing is a secret every violinist should know to facilitate this penetrating kind of relaxation.

Clayton Haslop is Concertmaster (leader) on hundreds of movie soundtracks, including The Matrix movies, Titanic, Avatar, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Star Trek, Up, Jurassic Park, Apollo- and The Perfect Storm. Haslop creates bestselling Instructional DVD courses used by beginning to professional violinists worldwide.

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