How to Find Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth position
Are you playing pieces that call for fourth, fifth and/or sixth position? Struggling with reading those notes? In this post, I’m going to show you where fourth, fifth, and sixth position are on the violin and exercises for you to get really comfortable in these positions.
Keep in mind, you will improve your violin position playing if and only if you study violin positions outside of pieces. The more technique you master, the easier your pieces will be. Sounds like fun, right? Let’s get started.
Fourth position on the violin
Fourth position is a fun position because your first finger lines up where your fourth finger was in first position which matches the open string above.
So that fourth finger plays E the first finger plays E and we are in fourth position so fourth position really has a nice ring to it.
When you get into fourth position just make sure your thumb is truly in fourth and not up in fifth and not back and third. Be sure that you do have a specific home for your thumb in fourth position.
A fun exercise to improve your fourth position playing skills is to just go from first to fourth finger to set up your hand frame so you can know the distance between your first and fourth finger in fourth position.
As you may know, when you go up the instrument your intervals get smaller so here in fourth position, our distance between one and four is going to be smaller than our distance between one and four in first position.
It’s really good for the first thing you do getting to know fourth position, is exactly the distance between your first and fourth finger and the way to do that is just have fun playing between the first and fourth.
You can even do it with varying rhythms. You could start off with eighths one and two and and then go to sixteenths, and just vary it up on the speed of that fourth finger coming down. Making sure your fourth finger comes down on its tip and nice and in tune.
When you’re finding fourth you want to be able to take your hand away and come back and land right on the spot for fourth position. Take your hand away bring it and land right on the spot okay.
What’s going to help you is when you know your thumb’s home. You’ll be able to find that really easily.
Practice:
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Fifth position on the violin
Let’s get up into fifth position. Fifth position lives where your second finger was in fourth position. Your F in fourth position is now gonna be your first finger so your two and four is now going to be replaced with your one. Another way to find fifth is just get the F in your ear from first position and then play up in fifth on the A string so first finger on A. Same thing make sure your thumb is in its home on the fifth in the fifth position home there okay and that your palm is facing the fingerboard that you’re not flipping out. When we come up in these higher positions you wanna always make sure your palm faces the fingerboard okay. So let’s stay in the key of C so this is going to be a wonderful augmented fourth that you’re going to be playing here F to B.
So that’s the uh devil’s chord, the tritone augmented fourth, diminished fifth okay so if it really bothers you you can play a B-flat okay so it’s your choice but I’m going to stay in the key of C for this exercise and play it B natural so same thing in three two one just really hearing your three as A, two as G and one for F, okay so then you can just play the same little tune that we created.
All right so you have that. If you find that anything’s a little out tune, you can review your four to three make sure your three is really in tune and just practice them lifting.
okay and then you have your little uh fun little tune.
Then you can listen to your two. You find that your two is not landing center just to play one and two, one and three, one and four okay so that’s our fifth position and you want to go ahead and do that on all strings and then let’s go into sixth position. So sixth position is G. It’s your G in first position with second finger up here with first finger. Okay our thumb in fifth it lives right here. Our thumb in six pretty much lives in the same place, might just be coming under a little bit as you’re bringing your hand around but the thumb is not going to move too much from fifth to sixth position. For me my thumb just kind of comes under a little bit more for a sixth position. Okay same thing, you want to take your hand away, relax your arm and bring it back and see if you can land exactly in sixth position. You wanna be able to to do that so you know that you know exactly where sixth position is. All right so that’s our G, we’re going to stay in the key of C and set up our hand frame again, our first to fourth finger, knowing that this is going to be even smaller distance between the one and four. Okay so you can just practice one and four,
one and three, one and two, okay and then we’ll do our little theme.
Okay and that’s your sixth position. So you may find between fourth, fifth and sixth, you might have a position that is a little bit more insecure than the others and just work that out. Work this exercise on all strings and then eventually you want to kind of be cruising through fourth, fifth, and sixth. So you can take that little theme start in fourth, shift to fifth, shift to six, okay and then for the tone you want to make sure every single pitch has gorgeous tone. So as where you’re going up higher in the instrument you have to bring your bow closer to the bridge okay and just listen that you have really good tone on every pitch. So in the key of C know that when you’re shifting from fourth position to fifth position the E to the F that it’s a half step. When you’re shifting from fifth to sixth, that that is a whole step from F to G. So you want to know the distance between the positions when you’re shifting. Now you can take this fun little exercise and put it in different keys. So you could do it in the key of G major, key of D major, key whatever key you want to play it in and just cruise through fourth, fifth and sixth on all strings and different keys with a fun little exercise. Okay. Love to hear from you in the comments below that you have completed this exercise on fourth, fifth and sixth positions and to let me know your findings. If you struggle with tone in upper positions on the violin, check out my video on how to find those high notes on the violin and play with good tone and you can find it right here in the corner. I’ll see you there. Ciao.
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