How to Get Rid of Left Hand Tension While Playing the Violin
Do you struggle with tension in your left hand and you just have no idea how to get rid of the tension and it keeps coming back and back and back to haunt you? In this post, you will learn how to get rid of left-hand tension while playing the violin.
I’m going to be discussing how to play with a relaxed left hand and exercises to get you there.
In order to get rid of left-hand tension while playing the violin, the first place to start is with your violin hold.
Step One: Investigate your violin hold that it is working for you and not against you.
How are you holding the violin? If you don’t have a good violin hold, your left hand may be compensating and that’s why you have the tension.
If you are not happy with your violin hold, you will love my post on how to hold the violin properly so you can really, really investigate your violin hold and make sure that you are absolutely helping yourself by having a great violin hold.
In this post, I’m really just going to get into the left hand and what you can do after you’ve set up a great violin hold to help your left hand not have tension.
Need help with your violin hold? Read How to Properly Hold the Violin for Best Results.
What does your relaxed left hand look like?
Step Two: Put your violin up as if you are going to play and shake out your left hand. Get it really nice and relaxed and then bring it to the violin. Your relaxed left hand is a perfect violin left hand.
Pay attention to your thumb to release left hand tension
Step Three: Your thumb. Most violinists like to have a lot of tension in the thumb to hold the violin and we want to have that left hand be relaxed all the time. We don’t want to be strangling or grabbing on for dear life. We just want to be nice and relaxed. That’s why the violin hold is so super important. That’s the first place to start and then once you have that relaxed left hand, bring it to the violin. You want to keep your thumb relaxed. Don’t be tempted to push in with your thumb. That’s the biggest, biggest tension problem I see.
When you have a relaxed left hand, you have a natural space that occurs between your thumb and your index finger here. We want to maintain that relaxed space while playing the violin. Your thumb is a very important key player in playing the violin because he allows us to know exactly where we are when we’re moving around the violin. There are two different schools of thought for the violin where the thumb belongs. You see players with a higher thumb. You see players with a lower thumb. I’m one that plays with a lower thumb and for me that is super great. There is a school thought to have a higher thumb. Now, it really doesn’t matter, as long as your thumb is relaxed mainly that’s the most important that it’s relaxed.
Using a light touch to release left hand tension
Step Four: Fingers. When you bring your fingers down, your fingers are coming down with their own strength and not using a pinching motion with the thumb and the finger to have it come down. You may be surprised to know that the fingers don’t have to have a lot of tension when they come down onto the fingerboard. So some violinists play with a lot of tension between the finger and the thumb in that motion. Now that does not need to happen.
Exercise Time
Exercise One: Investigate how your fingers are coming down. Go ahead and set up to play and set down your finger as hard as it can go and then slowly release it to find out how lightly your finger can actually come down without affecting the tone negatively. Now if the finger’s too light, it’s going to whistle so we don’t want that but we also don’t want to be gripping with the finger as it’s coming down super, super hard. It doesn’t need to come down hard and that’s going to actually make it difficult to play fast.
Now if you find that when you’re playing and your thumb likes to just tense up in some specific places and your thumb is your tension culprit and perhaps you have tension here, I’ve got an exercise for you that you can do.
Exercise Two: You can play any scale and what we are going to do is actually play it without the thumb. This is a pretty tricky little exercise and you may find that you’re playing suffers. You might play some things out of tune but what it does is it helps you realize, “Hey I really don’t need that thumb to have my fingers come down.” Play the entire scale without your thumb. Now once you have that down and you go into playing your pieces, any type of piece and you find that your thumb is tensing up, what you want to do is what I call a thumb dance so you can go back to your scale, bring your thumb back, but once in a while just do a little thumb dance or a thumb wiggle to help relax that thumb just to make sure that it’s not sitting here with tension. If the thumb is tense, holding up and pinching the violin, that is obviously going to cause a very tense left hand.
So those are some pointers that you can use to implement to help keep your left hand relaxed. Take note of when your left-hand tenses up maybe it’s when you have a low two and a four or just take note of what finger is coming down perhaps it’s a high three or what’s going on that’s causing some tension in the left hand, okay.
Enjoy and I’d love to hear your comments below. What was your biggest breakthrough from this post and what are you going to be implementing into your violin practice to help play without tension in the left hand?
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