violin lesson and bridge-carving
Jul. 29th, 2003 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslThis Saturday, I had my first violin lesson from Hugo, an old Italian immigrant.
He burned me a couple of CDs of classical violin for inspiration. I pay him R$30.
He taught me that the correct left-hand position is automatically achieved by fingering A,F,D,B or D,G,C,F. The rest of it was bow work and violin position. He showed me that the violin's position is common-sense: just put it in the most natural place for the right arm to do its thing.
Its thing is:
* The hand should be slightly lower than the arm when the bow is down (rectangle position).
* The hand should bend(triangle position)
* The hand should be supple (this takes time to master), and part of the bow-drawing is done by the hand: first phalanx goes from straight to perpendicular, thus pushing the bow. In fact, for very short bow movements, the arm should not move at all. I have a lot of work to do here: I could practice with a pencil too: pushing it up and down while keeping a good hold. If it's not of the violin, the bow should be hard to hold: the pinky should feel a lot of pressure. My newly-long right-hand fingernails are getting on the way of properly holding the bow: so that's a constraint on being a good violinist and guitarist at the same time.
* I can improve my tone by bowing harder.
* My bow hold is far from classical.
--
Today I called my luthier to carve me new bridges, but he wanted R$60 for it (US$20). So I decided do it myself, with my own "lixa". It worked out really well. Now I have 4 functioning bridges:
* the "uncarved" (machine-carved?) bridge is really high
* his bridge is almost flat on GDA, but has a rather big angle on DAE.
* my first bridge is about 1mm lower than his overall, and the angle is more balanced
* my second bridge is even lower than the first, by about 0.5mm (the E is almost effortless to finger) and is overall flatter than the others (a *fiddler*'s bridge), though not as flat as it gets.
One lesson: the A and the E carve their own holes in the wood, so give them that room, otherwise it may be lower than you want (or you can move the bridge).
Not bad for my first time. It's probably the last too. Except my left thumb hand muscle and my back started hurting.
I wish I had my digital camera to photograph this whole thing.
He burned me a couple of CDs of classical violin for inspiration. I pay him R$30.
He taught me that the correct left-hand position is automatically achieved by fingering A,F,D,B or D,G,C,F. The rest of it was bow work and violin position. He showed me that the violin's position is common-sense: just put it in the most natural place for the right arm to do its thing.
Its thing is:
* The hand should be slightly lower than the arm when the bow is down (rectangle position).
* The hand should bend(triangle position)
* The hand should be supple (this takes time to master), and part of the bow-drawing is done by the hand: first phalanx goes from straight to perpendicular, thus pushing the bow. In fact, for very short bow movements, the arm should not move at all. I have a lot of work to do here: I could practice with a pencil too: pushing it up and down while keeping a good hold. If it's not of the violin, the bow should be hard to hold: the pinky should feel a lot of pressure. My newly-long right-hand fingernails are getting on the way of properly holding the bow: so that's a constraint on being a good violinist and guitarist at the same time.
* I can improve my tone by bowing harder.
* My bow hold is far from classical.
--
Today I called my luthier to carve me new bridges, but he wanted R$60 for it (US$20). So I decided do it myself, with my own "lixa". It worked out really well. Now I have 4 functioning bridges:
* the "uncarved" (machine-carved?) bridge is really high
* his bridge is almost flat on GDA, but has a rather big angle on DAE.
* my first bridge is about 1mm lower than his overall, and the angle is more balanced
* my second bridge is even lower than the first, by about 0.5mm (the E is almost effortless to finger) and is overall flatter than the others (a *fiddler*'s bridge), though not as flat as it gets.
One lesson: the A and the E carve their own holes in the wood, so give them that room, otherwise it may be lower than you want (or you can move the bridge).
Not bad for my first time. It's probably the last too. Except my left thumb hand muscle and my back started hurting.
I wish I had my digital camera to photograph this whole thing.