How the Violin Works
(Note: I wrote this in Google Drive and then copied-and-pasted it here. Apparently Blogger is jealous, because it wreaked havoc on the format and I was only able to fix most of it. Hmm.)
This is not actually, as the title suggests, a post on how the violin works. That’s actually really cool, and I suggest you research it on your own if possible, but this is actually about what and what not the violin is capable of. I just didn’t feel like naming it “What can the violin do?” Hopefully this will also be at least mildly interesting to my other readers, but to be honest, the main audience of this post is the people I collaborate with. I record my violin for their melodies.
Also, I didn’t mean it like this either, Floppyboi. Hmmph.
The open strings of a violin are G3, D4, A4, and E5. If you bow the strings without putting any of your fingers on the strings, those are the notes the violin will emit. They are tuned to perfect fifths, as you will notice if you look up the pitches.
Each string has a different tone. The lowest string, the G string, has a rich, warm, and fuzzy tone. The D string is like the G string, except less warm and much less fuzzy. It’s honestly my favorite of all the strings. The A string has a sharper tone, but still pleasant. The E string, the highest one, is the string I could quite honestly use as a cheese cutter wire if I didn’t care about my violin at all and didn’t mind the taste of rosin (I’ll talk about that later). It has a very sharp, clear, almost shrill tone that stands out a lot.
When playing the violin, you use the four fingers of your left hand (the thumb curls around the neck of the violin and just chills there. Just chills). Your index finger is your “first” finger, your middle your “second” finger, and so on. Your first finger, in first position (we’ll talk about different positions later) usually plays in one of two places: a semitone, or half step, above any string (a “low 1”) or a whole step above any string (a “high 1”). Your second finger can play 1 ½ steps above ay string (low 2) or two whole steps above any string (high 2). The third and fourth fingers are slightly more interesting. A regular third finger is a half step above a high second finger, but a half step above that can be played either with a high third finger or a low fourth finger. A regular fourth finger, a half step again above that, plays the same note as the open string above the string it is on. For example, a regular fourth finger on the A string plays an E.
To recap:
Which high and low fingers a violinist plays on each string depends on the key and individual accidentals, which might mark, say, a sharp for one note, even though the key denotes a natural. The more sharps, and more so flats, there are in a key, the harder it is to play on the violin. Some good, violin-friendly keys are A Major (three sharps), D Major (two sharps), G Major (one sharp), C Major (no sharps or flats), B flat Major (one flat), and F Major, (two flats), plus the relative minors.
I mentioned that I would talk about other positions later, and later is now. The fingerings I talked about are for first position. To shift into second position, you put your first finger where your second finger would go in first position, for third position, you put your first finger where your third finger would go, and so on. There are technically as many as ten positions on the violin, but usually anything beyond the fifth is showing off and not used for normal playing. Positions are generally used for going higher above a B natural on the E string and resolving extra-tricky fingerings and string crossings. However, each time you must shift from one position to another position, it’s tricky to keep the violin from making a bad sound. There can be faint finger-sliding-up-the-string sounds, or you may overshift or undershift and the note you shift to will be out of tune. Because, remember, violins have no frets.
*envy of guitarists, banjoists etc intensifies*
Anyway, different positions are very tricky to get right. Even if a shift is necessary for a piece of music, I suggest that you leave an open string or a short rest around the shifting part, so that the violinist has time to shift.
Now that you’ve seen the left hand, now let’s move on to the right one: the bow hand.
A violin bow is, basically, a fancy stick. The stick’s function is to support the bow hair. The bow hair is quite literally horse hair. Just like human hair, horse hair has microscopic scales on it:
Violinists regularly apply purified, hardened tree sap (or “rosin”) to the bow hairs, so that when drawn across the string, they create Helmholtz motion and vibrate the string. Those vibrations travel down the bridge, through the sound post (a little stick inside the violin, under the bridge) and all around the violin, and get converted into sound. The sound then comes out the f-holes of the violin- the holes shaped like fancy fs.
I didn’t need to explain that, but I find it really cool, so I did anyway.
One thing to mind when writing for the violin is to try to avoid very long notes. Like a singer running out of breath, a violin can run out of bow. Sometimes an orchestra can cope with that by having everyone in the section change bow, or “rebow” at different times. This is much more obvious with only one violinist, however.
The bow usually only contacts one string at a time. When you need to play notes on another string, you simply lift the bow arm up slightly, or pull it down slightly, to cross strings. The bow can also play two adjacent strings at once. These are called double stops. It’s important to consider the left hand when writing double stops in music.
The violin can technically also play three or four notes at once, but it’s quite tricky. For a four-note chord, you start playing the bottom two strings, then quickly transition to the top two strings so it sounds smooth. If you really want a four-note chord, again, make sure it’s possible in terms of the left hand. If you want three, four, or even two notes at once for longer harmonies, then the more convenient thing to do would be to layer different recordings on top of one another.
In general, so far the focus of this has mainly been on things the violin can’t do. Now let’s talk about the things it can.
The violin in general is much more expressive than a piano. One reason is because of the many, many different bow strokes you can play on the violin. Here’s a pretty comprehensive list:
Thus concludes my nearly five-page guide to how the violin works.
Whew.
Nice Informative Blog, Love the screenshot!
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