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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus-Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Fred Finn's from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we'll be talking about unlocking the left hand. We have been covering various topics related to playing faster this month and we have come over to tension in the left hand, and this is a big one for helping you play faster. It also helps with your tuning.
There are two ways to work on loosening up your left hand, and I want to point out that messing with your technique and how you hold and play the violin can be disruptive to your playing and that is frustrating. So there's kind of two approaches here, and I have done them both. One is to stop everything to just focus on retraining your hand, and another way is to train a new way of playing alongside your still playing in your usual way that you're used to for most of your repertoire. There was a summer after my freshman year of college I went home to Syracuse and I took from a local teacher at a university in the area and she basically had me stop everything to retrain my left hand, because even after all of the times I had worked on left hand skills, I'd been doing it the other way, you know work on loosening my left hand and my left arm in different ways while still playing a lot in the way that I was used to, and then try to integrate the two together.
This teacher felt like hadn't done enough and since I wasn't in school I didn't have a lot of orchestra repertoire to learn. I wasn't having to prepare for studio class and juries. She said you know, I just want you to play everything that you're doing your scales, your etudes, your whole concerto in this radical new way. And what I was doing was playing all of the notes with my left hand, with harmonics there's not a harmonic on every note on the violin but playing very lightly with my finger just touching the string and not pushing it down it's painful to listen to to do a nice strong right hand bow on the string and then play these really light fingers on the left string and to do an entire concerto.
02:50
I think I was working on the Mendelssohn Third Movement to do all your practice like that and having it all sound squeaky and harmonicky. I mean, this woman was kind of a genius and she got me on board. She said just do this for a month and you will get this tension out of your left hand. It's slowing you down. I couldn't get my tempo up on the Mendelssohn and it was a huge help, although it was painful and painful for my family, my long suffering family. That was my, you know, my parents. Now it's my kids who suffer from my practicing.
03:29
But before that, before that stop everything to retrain moment, when I was probably 18 or 19, I had done a lot of work. I used to hold my pinky really curled in and very tense below the neck of the violin while I was playing and that was something where I did some skills or specific songs that weren't too hard for me, focusing completely on my pinky and then try to integrate that with the rest of my playing. But I wasn't constantly trying to like learn new repertoire and do everything at all my playing all the time with my pinky out with the rest of my fingers and relaxed, especially because I was probably 12 or 13 at the time and I just didn't have the focus to be working on it all the time. Whether you're doing it, stop everything and play with a loose hand or you're trying to work on one aspect and work that into your playing. You want to check your thumb, left hand thumb, your forearm, your shoulder, your armpit these are all places that can be tense and the tension can keep your hand locked on the fiddle and it will make it harder for you to move your fingers around, both in like micro adjustments for tuning and for playing quickly. So to loosen yourself up there, you can swing your left arm back and forth. You know, play a little bit, stop, swing your arm back and forth, make sure you're unlocked in your shoulder, in the front of your shoulder Classic one that Suzuki teachers use as for a student to stop and just rub their thumb on their left hand against the neck of the violin. Because if you've got a real grip on the neck that's what I'm talking about that will slow you down. So if you rub your thumb back and forth, you're kind of releasing some of that tension in your left hand, trying not to grip the neck of the violin.
05:24
You can work on drops. So drops is I don't know why I call it this. I do it with bow grips too, where you make a bow grip and then drop your arm down off the bow so that the bow grip right before your arm drops is like the most relaxed gooey bow grip you could have On the fiddle. It's basically similar. You can hold the fiddle with your head and maybe also with your right arm, so no bow involved. Put your fingers on the string, make your arm heavy, heavy, heavy, so heavy that it just falls down off the fiddle. You know wax against the side of your leg and that heavy, heavy hand is also relaxed, so it's working on releasing tension in your left hand and what that feels like. Then you bring your arm back up, put your fingers on the string and drop it again, and the point is not to just flail your arm around, but you want to feel what it feels like, to let that tension go right before it drops. You don't want to be pulling your violin down and dropping your violin while you're playing. You do want to release some of that tension. You can double check with all this that you're using walking fingers mostly just one finger at a time that will keep you from gripping and that the other fingers are pretty loose and relaxed.
06:41
I don't insist that my students keep them all just sort of perfectly curved right over the string. I just don't think that that helps. And when you watch Lexi Boatwright play the concertina, her fingers are flailing everywhere and yet she's one of the best. She's just at the very top of the Anglo concertina. How fast and how beautifully and how rhythmically people can play that. I mean if your fingers flail a little, but if they're tense, you know if you've got that pinky or third finger curled under the neck, really tense, and locked up into your hand. That's something to pay attention to. If you want to drop everything and just try to retrain your left hand, you can do that trick with the harmonics.
07:26
Another way that my college teacher, my professor Lynn Blakesley, would have kids do this is she had a foam, kind of square that you could stick your scroll into on her wall of her studio and she had a couple of different heights you know different heights of students and she would want you to play and take one to your practice room. So you stick your scroll into this foam and now the violin is just held between the wall and your shoulder and you're trying to play with this really loose left hand. It's a little uncomfortable because your violin is just stuck in this one position. But for someone who's been squeezing the neck between their thumb and their base of their first finger, she would use this technique to get them to let go. Let go of their grip on the neck with their left hand, because now the hand can do nothing to hold the violin up. The violin's just being supported against the wall.
08:25
Another thing you can do is just play the violin without the bow. That sounds crazy, right, just practice without the bow. People tend to tense up when they're trying to get a good sound on the string with their bow. So play through for a couple days or a week. Play through your tunes to all your practicing on the string, trying to keep your left hand really loose. No bow. With kids really little kids constantly checking their hand and softening it, making sure their thumb is loose, loosening their grips, making sure their fingers are loose. If I work with a kid for many years and I've basically helped them physically when they're young, loosen up their hand, then they're gonna be able to do that themselves, because they know what it feels like for me to check their wrist and cue them, to loosen up their wrist and loosen up their hand and they get that skill for themselves. I don't know if you have an adult who you want to be all in your business touching your wrist and your hand and helping you relax and release tension from your hand, but that is something that we do with kids. So some ideas for unlocking your left hand. You can work on it with some easy tunes and scales and then try to work it into your playing, or you can drop everything, just go nuts. Try to learn to play in a new way. Our tune for today is Fred Finn's.
09:54
Fred Finn was a fiddler from Sligo, born in 1919. He's a really popular musician in South Sligo, western Ireland. His father was Mick Finn and was a politician. I tried to figure out on some Irish politics like Wikipedia what Fred Finn's father like, what kind of party or position he was involved with, but Irish politics is complicated and I couldn't get to the bottom of it, at least not this morning. But Mick also played the violin and his son, fred, played the violin and he most famously performed as a duo with Peter Horan. Peter Horan was a flute player and they played together fiddle and flute For 30 years. They performed as a duo Sounds really nice. He also played with the Glenview-Kaley Band and toured America with members of the Coleman County-Kaley Band and made a lot of recordings for like radio and TV in the 70s and 80s. Fred Finn and we will play it for you now.
12:09
Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.
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