Never miss a violin shift again

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• published: 14 Jul 2016
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I reveal my "two-putt" method of shifting, which I picked up on the golf course. Armed with this method of practicing shifts, you'll experience total confidence both in practice and performance. Here I take a look at Saint-Saens violin concerto No. 3, Paganini La Campanella and the Schubert C Major cello quintet. Here's a link to the sheet music for the Saint-Saens so that you can try it for yourself: http://imslp.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_No.3,_Op.61_(Saint-Sa%C3%ABns,_Camille) And visit http://www.natesviolin.com for more tips, tricks and posts! TRANSCRIPT: I'm Nathan Cole of natesviolin.com and we are on the range. We're going to practice our marksmanship today with some big shifts in Saint-Saëns' third concerto. So how do I know that I'm going to make these shifts, and how are you going to know that you're going to make your shifts? Do you have to practice them a million times, kind of building them up slowly using guide fingers? Breaking down the positions, measuring the distances? Those are not all bad ideas but the big problem there is that I didn't hear anything about listening: listening to the actual notes on the way up. That's the real secret and that's how you're going to be confident to always hit your shifts... I'm going to put a little asterisk by that. I'm not going to say that I'll never miss a shift again (even though that's the title of this video). But your confidence is going to be so high that you're not going to worry about playing the right note at the end of the shift, which is after all what this is about. Let's switch up the sport... to golf. Because in golf, I think there's a real similarity: making long putts. It's a lot like shifting, big shifts for us. And when I took golf lessons the instructor had a great exercise for working on long putts. He'd draw a big circle, maybe two or three feet in diameter, around the hole and he would have everybody aim for the big circle and say, "This is about a two putt." So as soon as everyone started doing that the putting strokes became so much more natural. You could tell everybody was having more fun, confidence was sky-high because it was easy to get it within that big circle. And you know what, a lot of people actually started making the putts just because they were more relaxed. They were focused on the right things and for us that's going to be listening. So here's how you can never miss a shift: [slow shift] Does that seem like cheating, the fact that I'm shifting so slowly? It's not cheating! I'm listening to the notes on the way up and I'm stopping when I get there. That's really all there is to it. I don't have to play the whole shift slowly: I'm going to work up there maybe eighty or ninety percent of the way, get close. And then the second part of my two putt, I'm slowing down into the note, listening so that the exact moment (now this part is precise), the exact moment I get to the note, that's when I have my best sound, vibrato, the complete finger pressure that I would normally have. And I do that for all the shifts and I practice them that way too. So now I've taken playing the right note in tune out of the equation. Then the whole game becomes changing the timing, so all the repetitions, all the training is really for your ears, not so much for the arm and the hand. That's going to get its repetitions in the course of this anyway. But you're training your ear. The greats like Heifetz had lightning, lightning quick ears. They could make these adjustments at the very last millisecond. We're refining the timing, so now it's starting to sound like a performance shift. Now what about shifts that are not new finger shifts? Let's take a different kind of shift, a simple one like from B to F-sharp, first to third position, first to third finger. Here we have a guide note, right? So it's the same technique: I'm listening for that D and the instant I reach it I drop the third finger. That's the case, say, for a very common pattern: shifting up an octave from first to fourth finger, for example from F-sharp to F-sharp. We've got the guide note of a C-sharp... and now by speeding it up... It's La Campanella! So I can't miss it low, right? Because I'm listening all the way up. I just keep going until I get there. And if I miss it high, that means I wasn't listening very carefully on the way up. Finally, what about those shifts that you can't really listen for on the way up? There's a notorious one in the Schubert cello quintet, where you have to shift up to an octave C. So what am I going to do there? I can't listen on the way up... but I practice it that way. There's my guide note of a G, and my hand is going to make that same motion, same easy motion in performance. Just the bow is going to be in the air. And I know that that C is going to be in the same place as it was when i was listening on the way up.