 This is a primer lesson on vibrato. If you've come to NCSSM without having played a lot of vibrato or maybe not had a lot of instruction on vibrato, I'd like to just give you a couple of tips on developing a vibrato. Now, I think the first thing that's important to remember is that developing a vibrato is exactly that. You're not, most people can't just play a vibrato the first time they try to do it. I like to equate it to weightlifting in that if I tried to bench press 200 pounds without building up to that amount of weight, I would probably hurt myself. I wouldn't do things correctly and I'd have poor technique. The whole idea with vibrato is that we start with small steps and we train our muscles to do it. So it does take time, but with steady and consistent practice, you'll be able to develop a vibrato in probably a relatively short period of time. So let me give you a couple of tips about playing position. I think these are quite important as you're developing a vibrato and some exercises to do to get you toward your goal. Now, I hope that at this point you have taken a quick look at my video that demonstrates good playing position. This is vital in developing a good vibrato. In fact, I oftentimes will tell students that probably the first violin lesson that they ever had is the most important lesson contributing to a good vibrato. And I know that's a little hard to believe, but it's really true. A good playing position is the first step. Now, in order to play vibrato, it's really important that you're not holding the instrument up with your left hand. You should be using a shoulder rest. I've frankly never had a student that didn't use a shoulder rest that I was able to teach vibrato. When students use a shoulder rest, they're holding their instrument properly and I can teach them to play vibrato. So I think that's the very first step. If you don't use a shoulder rest, I recommend that you stop the video and go get one. So, okay, so now let's move on here. Now, a good playing position, as you already know, the instrument's on your shoulder and it's being supported between your jaw and your shoulder. I'm not holding the instrument up with my left hand at all. Then when my left hand comes up to the instrument, it's free to finger and to do vibrato. Now, you also know that if the strings form a plane between the strings and the ground, your elbow should be inside that plane or at least in the plane, here or inside the plane. Now, to begin vibrato, I like students to shift up and don't worry about what pitches you're playing, but I like you to rest your hand on the shoulder of the instruments. We're gonna rest our hand right here that really amounts to about maybe fourth or fifth position, depending on where your fingers lay down. Now, a couple of things that you can do to begin to develop a vibrato. These are kinda can be silly little exercises, but they do really contribute to it. The first one I have students do is wave to themselves. Now, as silly as that is, if you wave to yourself in a regular pattern, it can begin to give you the feel of what vibrato is and it can develop those muscles in the back of your hand. I want you to know that vibrato is part finger, part hand, and part arm, and so we're gonna develop all of those muscles here. So first thing we're gonna do is wave. The second thing that we're going to do is tap our fingers on the string. Now, you're gonna see that I'm tapping on the G string with all my fingers, D string, A string, and E string, and just practice a nice regular tap. So I recommend at this point that you turn off the video and practice waving to yourself and then tapping on the strings. Now, I'm assuming now that you've practiced waving to yourself and tapping on the strings in a regular motion. Now, our next little exercise I like to call polishing the strings and that's when you take all of your fingers and you slide them up and down on the G string, the D string, the A string, and the G string. Now, you're gonna notice that I'm moving my hand in this motion, same motion as the wave, same motion as the tap, but now it's a little more controlled and it's a little more clearly rhythmic. You can actually hear the strings a little bit as my fingers slide. Another variation on that is to slide in a pattern. I like to do one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Then I switch strings. So now, I recommend that you turn off the video and practice polishing the strings in very even quarter notes and then in a pattern of quarter, quarter, quarter, quarter, eighth, eighth, eighth. Okay, now we've practiced our polishing the strings and the other techniques I've shown you. The next step is to now begin to play an actual pitch. Now, I wanna stress to you again that the pitch that you start playing on doesn't really matter to me. It does matter that your hand is against the shoulder of the instrument. It's for support. And also, I want you to notice that my index finger is not clamped against the neck of the violin. I've gotta make sure that that index finger is released. So make sure of that. That needs to be unclamped. So it sort of takes you bringing that elbow in a bit and you have to be up on the tips of your fingers. Now you can simply set your second finger down and I would put my first down as well but we're gonna use second finger for this exercise. And this is what I call the cat's meow. Now it's very similar to the polish but now we're sitting on a pitch. So I'm gonna find a pitch. In fact, I'll start on the G string. I've got my second finger down. I don't care what pitch you play but I simply want you to roll that finger forward and backwards. Doesn't sound real nice. I want you to do it nice and slow. Now I want you to try that with your second finger on all four strings. D string, A string, E string. You'll notice that I do about eight moves per bow. Now this can be a very difficult step for students as you begin to put the bow down on the string, keep working at it and it will eventually come. I recommend then that you practice that technique with all four fingers. And fourth finger, now here's the thing. Fourth finger is really hard for some kids and if it's hard, do it more. The more you practice fourth finger vibrato, the more it'll happen. A lot of kids feel like, well, second and first are quite easy and they just sort of stick with those but you really need to do fourth finger more to develop it and you wanna practice that on all four strings as well. So go ahead and pause the video and try a cat's meow on each of the four strings. Now the next step is to do that in various rhythmic patterns. Much like we did our polish, we're now going to do the cat's meow doing four quarters than four eighths. Second finger, that begins to get us speeding that rotation up a little bit. And you can tell it's not a far jump from to get to the point where where you can vibrate. So keep working to increase the speed on that cat's meow and eventually it becomes vibrato. So that's really the technique. I wanna stress that a little bit of practice on all of these techniques every day is what really makes it happen. And it doesn't happen overnight. Take the part of the technique that is most difficult for you and do it the most. That's when you'll really get better at this and that's when vibrato will really, really work. I wanna remind you one last time that initially your hand will be against the butt of the instrument and you wanna make sure that your index finger is released from the neck. Once you get really good at doing it there, then start pulling back to third position, second position and first position and do it without your hand anchored against the butt of the instrument. Again, a little bit at a time and you will develop the technique.