"Sniff and Toss" is the short way to get into great posture, once you've gotten used to the idea of counterbalancing. I'm writing a post about it because I do it all the time now with my students, and now I do it with new students because it's easy to do, to say, and to remember.

Procedure:

1. Big sniff through your nose, sending it all into that point in your chest where you would wear a gold medal. Your chest will inflate. Your shoulders will stay loose and relaxed and down where they were.


2. Huff out through your mouth as you swing your arms toward the ground. Your elbows are heavy and swing toward the floor. Your elbows stay close to your body. Let your hands (and violin) swing up using the momentum. You will feel your shoulder blades tilt down in back. Leave them down there so that your arms are suspended in front of you using the muscles in your back.


3. When you tossed, the violin probably came flying at your head and you turned it around quickly and parked it on your shelf. If not, I hope you are OK and not hurt...


4. Let your head drop into the chinrest.


5. Check in with your loose knees.

I have been thinking about the Sandwich a bunch in the last 2 years in my own playing, but it hasn't been time to introduce it to my students. Suddenly, this week, it's time! It's so exciting! Especially for one viola student I have who is now bursting out of her skin with how cool it is to be able to play the viola and feel like it's easy. Woohooo!

I gave a couple of students the "center of the universe" exercise last week. I haven't written about that exercise yet. But I see that it is good preparation for the Sandwich #1.

Purpose of the Sandwich: further shoulder relaxation. It also somehow magically fixes a lot of things and I don't really understand why. The other thing I don't understand is why in the world it makes me and my students feel so amazing when we're playing. It is seriously a huge rush and is making me wonder, should it be legal?! :-)

The Sandwich #1

1. Sniff and Toss


2. violin floats on top of your shelf.


3. feel like your head is floating 10 feet above you, so that you're looking down on yourself playing. Keep that feeling and let your chin down into the chinrest.


4. With your head still feeling like it's floating, imagine that the rest of you is looking up at the violin, playing from underneath it. Letting your knees relax forward will help you get this feeling.


5. It will feel like your violin is in the middle of a sandwich, with your head floating and looking down, and the rest of you playing up from underneath the violin.

There's another type of sandwich that happens when you play. This one is probably mostly happening for you if you're already counterbalancing, but it's helpful to visualize it specifically.

Procedure:

1. Sniff and Toss


2. Feel how your shoulder blades are down in back, supporting your arms, so that your hands are just floating up in front of you. Your left hand is floating there in the air. As long as you're counterbalancing in back, that left arm/hand will be able to float up there with no more work on your part.


3. Drop a finger onto the fingerboard. Notice that the fingerboard just happens to be sandwiched between your floating arm and your dropping finger. It isn't holding up your finger, nor is it being held up by your hand and arm. It's just there in the middle.


4. Feel that balance between your floating arm and your fingers dropping. As you drop a finger, it is balanced by your floating arm -- too much force and it will disturb your fingerboard. You want to drop each finger just enough that it still remains in balance with your floating arm. The fingerboard just happens to be in the middle of this balancing act. This is the Fingerboard Sandwich.

This seems like a good time to talk about "tilt and pop" since I just posted about the Sandwich #2. I like to center all of my students' hands around the 3rd finger. If you do this, you will have to pull back towards the scroll a bit to place a low first finger (B flat on A string, for example).

I often see students very gracefully reach back for the low 1, but then forget to let their hand come back into the "normal" place once they're done playing the low 1. Here is a song that I use to practice the "tilt" followed by the "pop".

Something I find myself saying a lot is "you don't practice with your ears." The first time I learned to play the violin, the strategy for practicing (as I understood it) was to lock yourself in a practice room and practice until you got it right. The really hard-core musicians spent hours and hours in there and often achieved a certain amount of status for doing so.

Instead of doing that, do yourself a favor and only use your ears as guides to tell you whether your movements are correct. As you practice, you want to concentrate on memorizing what movements you are doing. Keep refining your movement each time you repeat something--be better at The Forehead, or The Sandwich, or whatever you are working on. Your ears will tell you when you're improving, but you will also know you're improving by an increasing feel of ease when you play.

Visualizing helps me and my students learn music more quickly with better technique from the very beginning. Here's what to do:

1. Pick a small section of a piece you're learning (say, 2 or 4 measures)
2. Read through it without your violin (rest position), but try to feel your fingers in your mind, going down on the correct place on the correct string, as you read.
3. There will probably be a part that was hard to "feel" in your fingers. Go back over it until you can feel all of the fingers. Note: if you can hear the music as you read it, go ahead and hear it and feel the fingers as you read.
4. Now try to get the same feeling in your fingers as you play the section on the violin.

Once you know what the section sounds like, you can also close your eyes and do the same steps as those listed above, but just hear the section in your head as you feel your fingers. You can also do this while you lie in bed at night--sometimes I'll do this with complicated, fast scale passages and find that the next day they are much improved on the instrument.

If you're not used to visualizing, this will really stretch you. Take it slowly (just a few measures -- or even a few notes -- at a time.

"dangly elbows" is another, shorter way to think about counterbalancing. Once you've felt what counterbalancing is like, this is a nice shortcut to getting that feeling again without all of the counterbalancing steps.

1. Sniff and Toss
2. Your shelf (chest) is now floating. Check in with your shoulder blades and elbows and let them feel like they're loose and dangling from your shelf.
3. As you play, keep thinking about your shoulder blades and elbows dangling.

How this relates to string crossings:

When crossing from the A to E string (or G to D, or D to A), your elbow drops a little and that changes the angle of your bow from the current string to the next string. Thinking about the elbow dropping works for many students. For some students, though, it results in the elbow moving without the shoulder blade moving at all. If you want your string crossing in this direction to be easier, and the shoulder isn't naturally following the elbow, instead think of this:

1. (assuming you're already dangling shoulder blades and elbows from your shelf)
2. to cross to the next string, feel your right shoulder blade relax and drop just a tiny bit. It will take the rest of the right arm, including the elbow, with it.

This method helps when you are (usually subconsciously) holding with your right shoulder to try to control the bow. If it feels like "cheating" when you're bowing because you're not doing enough work, it's probably perfect. :-)