Violin Vibrato Prep Exercises
Want to learn vibrato on the violin but don’t know where to start? In this blog post, I’m going to give you eight violin vibrato prep exercises to help you learn vibrato properly on the violin.
Violin Hold
The first place to start with vibrato on the violin is with your violin hold. You may be thinking okay what does a violin hold have to do with vibrato but it has everything to do with the vibrato.
If you’re holding the violin with a tense left hand and your posture is not correct, it’s gonna be very, very difficult for you to vibrate on the violin. That’s why the violin hold is so important.
Violin Vibrato Preparatory Exercise One
What I want you to do for the very first exercise is to hold your violin just with your jaw and your shoulder without your left hand and walk around the room. See how long you can hold the violin for. Talk to your friends, grab your phone say, “Yeah, I’m practicing my violin hold. Whatever you need to do to just practice holding the violin without tension between your jaw and your shoulder and without your left hand.
If you need help investigating your violin hold, check out my blog post how to hold a violin properly. In the post, I walk you through every single step that you need in order to know that you are holding the violin properly and in such a way that it’s not going to give you pain.
Violin Vibrato Preparatory Exercise Two
This exercise is still without the violin and bow. I want you to do what I call shaky, shaky with the left hand. Allow your left hand to relax and feel yourself shaking it back and forth stemming from the wrist.
Once you have that going, go ahead and bow your imaginary violin with your imaginary violin bow. If you find this to be difficult, do it a little bit every day. You can do it anywhere.
These violin vibrato prep exercises help you strengthen your muscle coordination and getting your two sides of the body to work together.
Violin Vibrato Preparatory Exercise Three
This exercise is with the violin. Let’s get our violin. We’re going to apply the previous exercises to the violin. Hold up your violin with your gorgeous violin hold.
We will start with the left hand shaky, shaky exercise but this time we’re actually going to bow open strings on the violin.
- Play beautiful whole bows on an open string frog to tip
- Start shaky, shaky with your left and. You don’t need to have your left hand touching the violin or anything. What is most important is to have the shaky, shaky while smoothly bowing your open strings.
- Listen that your bows are not affected by the shaky, shaky.
This exercise is specifically again for muscle development and coordination.
Violin Vibrato Preparatory Exercise Four
While holding the violin allow your left hand to follow the fingerboard up. While doing this, focus on the movement of your forearm coming closer to the bicep. While moving up the instrument the angle is becoming smaller and then when you move back to first position, the angle becomes bigger.
We’re making it bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller.
Great so we basically just took those two exercises without the violin and bow and put the violin and bow in our hands and did them again with the instrument.
Violin Vibrato Preparatory Exercise Five
Again while holding the violin up between your jaw and shoulder, take your left hand and put your thumb on the back of the violin here and take your second finger and put it on top of the violin in the shoulder quadrant. Gently move your hand back and forth with the motion running parallel to the fingerboard of the violin.
With all vibrato exercises, be sure the motion is always running parallel to the fingerboard.
While practicing this motion, be aware of the relationship between the thumb and the fingers. We have our finger on its tip just like we would if we were having it on the fingerboard but for this exercise, it is on the wood of the violin.
Practicing vibrato on the shoulder of the violin is a little bit easier because it is not convoluted with strings and we’re just working on the motion all the time keeping your thumb relaxed.
We don’t want the thumb to be doing strange like being bent or harboring tension. You have the fleshy part of the thumb in contact with the back of the violin and the fleshy part of the finger moving back and forth following the parallel motion to the fingerboard.
The next step is to do that with every finger.
Violin Vibrato Types
Now just to clarify, there are two different types of vibrato that you can develop. One is arm vibrato and the other is what I call the hand vibrato, some people call it wrist vibrato.
These violin vibrato prep exercises are basic preparatory exercises to get your muscles going so they’re okay to do if you’re just wanting to develop vibrato. Don’t be too concerned right now about whether you are developing a hand or arm vibrato.
Violin Vibrato Preparatory Exercise Six
This exercise is again without the bow. We are going to practice the motion of going up and down the violin, following parallel yet again with the fingerboard. We will eventually do this exercise with every finger but we will start with the first finger on the A string, then second finger on the A string, then third and fourth finger on the A string.
While you’re doing these exercises make sure that your thumb is naturally nice and relaxed.
Violin Vibrato Preparatory Exercise Seven
This exercise is the same as the previous but we will be adding the bow. Take the bow and do the same exercise with the left hand but now we’re going to go ahead and bow open strings the entire time with long whole bows.
We start with the first finger on the pitch B on the A string. When we go up the fingerboard, we don’t need to go all the way up to B. the motion is what you are practicing – not the pitch. You want to just naturally move up and down the fingerboard. We take the larger motion and we’re going to make it smaller, smaller, smaller and smaller until we’re in one place.
Violin Vibrato Preparatory Exercise Eight
Building off of Exercise 7 where we took a very large oscillation and made it smaller. The next step is to continue that motion but keeping your fingertip glued to the same spot.
Naturally, continue the motion in its smallest form from Exercise 7, but for this exercise, your finger is staying in same in the same place.
Now just know that developing vibrato takes a lot of time.
Most important is that you practice these exercises with a proper linear parallel to the fingerboard motion.
Now of course, that’s only the beginning. Want more vibrato training? Click here to register to receive my Free Your Inner Vibrato workshop.
See you there!
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