Lesson One
This is the most important 4 words I will ever pass on to you. There is no violin. Equally important is, there is no bow either! We learned in the first three violin lessons that having the sense of no violin has to do with balances. I hope you have spent time really getting the sense of suspension and the violin being part of the balances you create in your body as opposed to your body compensating for the violin. You may think this is nothing. Let's just play a tune already! But you know what? This is EVERYTHING! Everything I teach about the violin, including musical phrasing later on, I teach in the first 12 lessons. EVERYTHING. I don't care how advanced in the musical repertoire a violinist becomes -- if these fundamental balances get lost the music will be lost. So carry on getting it right now because later it's even easier to discard and then difficulty builds on difficulty rather than success building on success.
Now we are ready for the bow "no hold" which comes about through establishing the correct balances as well.
First take the bow in your left hand and hold it upright with the hair to your left. Now insert your right thumb between the hair and the stick. Make contact with the stick with the tip of your right thumb where the notch is created between the wrapping and the frog. Now bend your right thumb so that it makes contact with the hair of the bow. (The frog is the black bit that holds the hair at the bottom of the bow.) Note that there is an angle where the thumb meets the bow and links with the hair. You will get this automatically if you let your right hand FLOP before inserting your thumb. The word we use here is LINK. You are LINKING your thumb to the hair of the bow. You are also linking through your thumb the stick with the hair. This link will not only be the balance needed to have the sense of no bow but will become your point of control and sensitivity to the bow stroke. It will be your physical contact with the string itself.
Still holding the bow upright with your left hand and keeping the link with your thumb spread out your right fingers, wave them a bit, SPREAD, then let them contact the stick of the bow. We call that CURL. But don't take that literally. Curl just means to let your fingers come into contact with the stick in a relaxed manner NOT becoming the claw.
Now you can let go with your left hand and just balance the bow. This is the same as balancing a pencil on the end of your finger. It just balances there.
And speaking of pencils, if you were to place a pencil in your hand to simulate the bow it would angle from the tip of your little finger to just under the base joint of your index finger.
There is a circle between the thumb and the third finger (with the stick between when everything is in balance.
The words to put to this are GIVE, give in the wrist or FLOP would do as well. LINK, link your thumb with the hair. SPREAD, spread your fingers. CURL, contact the stick with your fingers. Give -- Link -- Spread -- Curl and give again.
If you can balance it there you are all set to put the bow to the strings.
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