Adding Color to Your Violin Music

There’s nothing quite like the language of music.  Just like a great poet weaves words together to create a powerful mental image, musicians can evoke emotions and stories with a simple tune – and it’s much more than just hitting the right notes.

For violinists, there is a multitude of details to keep in mind, including your bow technique, vibrato, phrasing and your overall tone.  A great musician also relies on a true understanding of the music, as we discussed in yesterday’s post about jazz drumming (but relevant to all musicians!).

All of these small details may seem overwhelming to the beginner, but as you continue with your violin lessons and get comfortable with your instrument, expressing yourself through the music will get easier.  To get you on the right track, here’s an excerpt from a great article by violinist Clayton Haslop:

Dynamics
An easy one, really. Yet certainly the way a line is shaped through the use of dynamic changes – i.e. conscious modulations in volume – will effect how the music breathes. What you don’t want are the unintended rises and falls in sound – ‘unsightly bulges’ – which come from unconscious changes in bow speed and pressure along the way.

Bow ‘color’
Namely, the subtle trade-offs made between bow speed and bow pressure. If you mean to convey a feeling of a more dense, purposeful nature, then greater pressure with less ‘travel’ is the ticket. If a more buoyant, transparent tone suits then make the opposite compensations, less pressure and more travel.

Vibrato
Yes, this can also be used in a nuanced way to affect phrasing. The speed and range of your vibrato can both be altered with practice and used effectively in shaping musical lines. Again, I tend to use my scale and arpeggio practice to warm up and expand the limits of my vibrato. You just have to be a little careful, when attempting to speed up and/or narrow the range of the vibrato, that you don’t become tight in the process. Belly-breathing is a great antidote for this tendency.

Left hand articulation