In Part 1, I talked about the global aspect of holding the violin and its bow. In this post, I will dive deeper into more detail on the muscle related issues while learning the violin. You will realize why learning the violin is so hard.
The neck
We are making the unnatural natural when we hold the violin. With our head tilted to the chinrest, we need to ensure that our neck is straight and has little tension. When you look in the mirror and your neck is not straight while holding the violin, this means you want to adjust your setup to ensure the optimal posture.
The shoulders
At the beginning of my learning process, I was taught to relax my shoulders because we have to move our left shoulder in order to reach different strings so it needs to be relaxed. On the other hand, the right shoulder does not engage much so it should be relaxed.
The left wrist
As I have stated in Part 1, we do not like tensions in violin playing. The wrists need to be soft and flexible. We should not let the left wrist projected outward from or folded inward to the neck of the violin. By keeping the left wrist straight and in its natural stage will help with octave frame and shifting. For example, when I tried to reach for a note with my pinky, I projected my wrist out unknowingly and the note was flat. I could not figure out why until I looked at the mirror. After that I tried to isolate this problem by slowly using the fourth finger and keep my wrist straight. It took me a while but I got rid of that bad habit.
Depending on your teacher and genre of music you play, you might have seen fiddle players with flat wrist because they do not normally shift to higher position on the fingerboard.
The right wrist
We need to have soft and supple right wrist in playing the violin. With the soft wrist, you will be able to bow parallel to the bridge. You might ask, “Why do we have to bow parallel to the bridge?” For adult beginners, we might not know that there are six sounding points on the space between the bridge and the fingerboard. By changing the sounding point, the sound we produce will change as well; it can be soft when we bow close to the fingerboard or loud when bowing closer to the bridge.
As you can in this post, I have addressed four different moving parts in playing the violin. Part 3 will focus more on the fingers on the left and right hands and the elbows. Enjoy practicing!