How to Master 3rds | Violin and Viola | Double Stops

today we're looking at different challenges surrounding playing thirds and i'll share my favorite exercises for mastering them let's go [Music] welcome back to my master class series my name is daniel kurganov and for those who are new here this is a channel dedicated to violinists of all levels from beginner to seasoned professional my goal is to help you free your sound and free your expression now having started violin very late the key to fast progress and overcoming obstacles for me has been to never stop focusing on the fundamentals of violin playing obsessing over intonation sound quality vibrato fluency and the cleanliness of all the basic strokes this allows us to continually grow and to learn new music faster and with less effort most importantly it allows us to immediately get to questions of interpretation and expression so with these master classes i aim to share the best of the best methods that i've collected and developed over the years now before we get started i want to announce that i recently began doing a monthly q a studio class for my subscribers on patreon it's been lots of fun and we've covered many interesting topics such as how to inject life and musicality into stretches of 16th notes that seem to just go on forever and just last week we talked about the right hand and the special role that it plays in articulation and developing the richness of your sound so please consider joining our little community you'll be supporting these videos and you'll get various other perks now let's get to some thirds the great violinist ruggiero ricci once said that if he could have only one exercise to practice in order to maintain his technique he would pick thirds this is because the challenges and benefits of thirds are pretty vast of course intonation so learning the tendencies that notes and intervals have to have and making habits out of those and hearing which note is out of tune is at the bottom or the top you know we shouldn't be adjusting both notes of our double stop simultaneously because that would just be chaos we wouldn't have a reference and aside from intonation the action of the fingers is actually more challenging because when we hold fingers down multiple fingers this actually diminishes our dexterity so we have to train extra for that other challenges include keeping loose in your hand and in your body not to mention shifting and vibrating with the same ease that you would for single notes so that's quite a lot to cover but the following exercises will really put you on the right track so we're going to start with exercises that cover the important basics cephjic is separating the voices and having you play them individually under a slur and then play the double stop so [Music] and so on this accomplishes a few things first of all you're able to take care of the quality of sound on each note individually and then by playing the double stop you can immediately compare the slur to the double stop and make sure that there's a confidence in the note placement now another way to do this of course is to vibrate the double stop [Music] when practicing this exercise make sure to do it in all different keys and be sure to practice with vibrato as well as without sufject goes on with a couple other variations [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] it's important to shift very slowly with very light finger pressure kind of like a sloth basically with every shift your first and third finger will have to change from a major third to a minor third right a a small interval and a large interval physically by doing that shift very slowly you're able to change the shape more accurately so if you go [Music] you're kind of going to be guessing and obviously if you've practiced this a lot you can switch very quickly but in the spirit of working on your fundamentals it's always good to kind of assume this sloth character during the shift now the fourth finger which is going up and down that should be very clear that should not be sluggish right so you have this juxtaposition of slow shifts and very articulate up and down motions of the fingers then he adds a couple variations so basically working out the dexterity of the fourth finger [Music] [Applause] [Music] then you do the same thing but now you're going to be lifting the second finger up and down [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so that was seth chick's fundamental exercise for getting your thirds ready to play scales to play passages himali's approach is similar to sevcix except now we're not separating the voices we're just starting to train fingers together foreign me [Applause] [Music] now this one's a bit tricky because he has you playing the double stop with the open string and that's kind of challenging to go from this to this so make sure you keep try to keep your second finger down when you're doing this slowly you can try vibrating all of the notes [Applause] the next exercise is actually my favorite this is from the roland vamos book which is based on the work of corgiv i actually made a complete video on this one exercise so you'll find that linked somewhere above and this one is really great because it's a short paragraph that you can memorize and then you can apply it to any groups of double stops not just thirds and it works out both fingers in all sorts of different combinations [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's not just a standalone exercise to do at the beginning of your practice session or whatever but you can actually apply it to any set of double stops that you happen to find in your repertoire you know there's always kind of some challenging combinations that you'll find and in that video i present some examples from concertos and other pieces so you can always stop for a minute and kind of work out those double stops using this simple paragraph and i promise you the double stops will fly after that the next exercise is by serve and it's focusing on the different ways that you can make the same shift with thirds so he takes these uh these double stops [Music] right so you have one shift and then you have two pairs of thirds [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] as before we want to make sure that our shifts are very very light and graceful right like a ballet dancer so no sort of kinks in the motion it should be very smooth [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and so this exercise is great because it has you doing the same shift in from many different perspectives the next exercise is from gregorian and this one is really good because it has you doing finger replacements [Music] so these replacement shifts are quite challenging especially when you have three one down to two four right the same double stop that can be a very tense shift if you're not paying attention so as with all of these make sure the shifts are very very light and very loose one variation he suggests is to add rhythms which would go like this [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the next exercise is from dunis those of you that have watched my other videos you know i'm a big fan of dunas even when the exercises get very crazy now this particular one is not crazy at all it's actually very clever and basically he has you shifting with thirds although you're not playing the double stops you're playing single notes and he's approaching the shifts from many different angles [Music] hey [Music] the subsequent chapters in this book add bigger shifts so it gets progressively more difficult and you can really use this to push your technique forward [Music] so you can try all of those out and notice which ones give you the most trouble and try to understand why is it shifting to and from a particular finger or is it a particular position or 1 3 versus 2 4 what gives you the most trouble right so the better you can identify that the more precise you can be when you practice this like you don't need to play through the whole book keep the things that are weak and and focus on those next we have another exercise from dunas and this is actually from his daily dozen which is a sort of distillation of many of his teachings into 12 exercises that could be done in one day this is the fourth exercise in the set and it's going to combine a lot of what we've done already in the previous exercises so it's a little more challenging and now we're getting to kind of really practicing scales and thirds which you know you'd think scales are a basic thing but actually scales are the product of exercises such as the ones we've been doing [Music] [Applause] so it goes up and then it comes back down the opposite way [Music] the slower you shift the easier it is for you to measure the length of that shift if you do something very quick you're just relying on muscle memory and so if you haven't built that muscle memory it's not going to be accurate and make sure to check every note possible with open strings or with kind of other reference notes that are reliable when the notes are aligned when things are in tune you'll feel the instrument vibrating you'll feel kind of vibrations in your head from the instrument when things are off there's a sort of deadening of the vibration for this last exercise it's unclear who wrote it it's probably been used for hundreds of years and you probably know it already and that is to put the fingers down on both notes of the double stop but only bow one of the voices so either fingers three and four or one and two so this can help often if you know you're having trouble figuring out where the exact intonation problem is and if you ever find yourself adjusting both voices at the same time something i mentioned earlier to avoid if you find yourself doing that i would try this exercise first i could do only the bottom notes [Music] or only the top note [Music] and that way you're able to isolate the problem and it tests your knowledge of you know whether you have a major third or a minor third because sometimes our understanding of wide or narrow third is dependent on playing both notes at the same time so by only isolating one of the voices it's testing how well you know that sequence of narrow and wide thirds now staying with that same example from paganini once you get into higher positions achieving a comfortable position with your fingers sometimes means approaching the fingerboard at a weird angle so it starts relatively normal [Applause] [Music] by this point my second finger is barely touching um with the the tip of the finger i'm actually kind of planting the nail into the fingerboard and just touching the string with with the finger so i'm not actually pressing it down in a normal way but the higher you go the lighter you can afford to touch the string you don't even have to press it all the way down by the time i get to that top one [Music] i'm essentially kind of hooking the note with my finger and again i don't have to press very hard so this weird sort of position works because it's not tense [Music] that gets us to some technical considerations so first the frame of the hand as i said nothing about this is natural for the fingers we have to find kind of a clever shape so that all the fingers fall into those spots without tension a couple of pointers on this one don't be afraid to remove the contact point of the side of the index finger from the neck right free the finger from the neck so that allows you to kind of stop compressing this finger if you need to reach further down with the index finger so that's just one of the tools we have we'd use that very often when we're playing tents for example in first position right if i just put my first finger down normally in first position and normally i am you know touching the side of the neck and then i try to play a tenth i'm getting very very tense and i'm still not even reaching it now if i free this finger see suddenly i can move the hand and stretch much further i'm almost playing on the side of the finger so the tenths become much easier even in first position right so you see that space between here this way my hand feels relatively loose and the fingers are not tense so look for opportunities to release that contact point i'm always reminded of the violinist augustine hadley who more than anyone i've ever seen essentially always plays without this contact point so his his fingers are kind of floating i don't know how his intonation is so good without that kind of reference for shifting but you can watch how easily he does these stretches because he's already in this sort of free position with the index finger the next tip in terms of the frame is something i've talked about before and that's knowing the tools that we have to adjust the frame so we have the swing of the arm right i can be in this way i can be kind of more under this way then we also have the leaning of the hand backwards and this comes in handy when you have uncomfortable stretches and then we have the supination from the forearm so what you get as a result is this kind of fanning out of the fingers when i combine all three of those and that fanned out position is essentially what i want to bring to the fingerboard now just a word about intonation i'm not going to go heavily in depth but just know that we are always kind of between two main intonation systems as violinists we have our just diatonic system sometimes referred to as the pythagorean system although although those aren't the same and that's based on ratios between the overtones so we're essentially lining up overtones and it's the most pleasing thing for our ear when overtones are lined up [Music] so i was kind of moving the first finger out of tune and then back into tune and you might have heard the idea of hearing beats in the sound so that's something you can try when it's out of tune you'll hear this sort of wa that's the interference that's the misalignment of the overtones and as soon as you get closer that beat frequency will get slower so it'll go and then it'll stop entirely once everything is perfect so that's how we tune double stops um that's also how you'd tune in a quartet or an orchestra if you're playing you know as a voice in a chord so in just diatonic tuning we essentially have to do the opposite as we would when we're playing a melody or a scale right when you play a g major scale [Music] that b which is your major third has to be nice and high you know so everyone knows how happy you are but in just diatonic tuning if you use that high b out of tune so the b has to be lower [Music] approximately 14 hertz and likewise your minor thirds so if you have a b flat if you use a nice and low b flat that you would use in a scale [Music] it's not going to be in tune you have to raise it a bit [Music] so getting used to that and hearing the lining up of overtones that's crucial for your intonation i encourage you to research more about melodic versus just tuning when developing your vibrato with thirds i highly recommend supporting your scroll now i made a video about this it was the second in my ultimate vibrato tips videos and i call it scroll support and basically it allows us to release a lot of the muscles involved in holding the violin um and it allows you to kind of more efficiently uh find the right angles if the vibrato is not flowing naturally there's going to be a tendency to tense up parts of the body to make it work so that kind of removes all of that from the equation and it lets you practice that sort of in a vacuum now of course there's much more that you can practice regarding thirds there is dunas is opus 30 which is a more advanced book on thirds then there's carl flash's scale book which has a nice sequence of thirds for every key then of course there's various etudes like jacob don't opus 37 number 19 it's a very beautiful etude a lot of thirds a lot of double stops don't opus 35 number eight this is a favorite of mine then of course we have paganini number eight paganini number four the list is very long so that's it for this episode stay tuned for my next video on thirds where i'm going to explain five different approaches to fingering choices when playing thirds and these range from the very logical to the totally crazy and i'm sure you'll see something you haven't seen before subscribe so you don't miss that one and consider becoming a patreon member to support the channel and get all sorts of other perks practice well and i'll see you next time

Channel: Daniel Kurganov, Violinist

Views: 34,582

Keywords: violin, violin lessons, amazing violin, daniel kurganov, paganini, violin tips, sound, technique, practicing

Id: of1HLpcuV4U

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2022