There's a big difference between concentrating really hard on something and being perfectly aware of something. In America, we're used to working hard to concentrate on something, but I prefer not to work at concentrating when I'm playing. On the other hand, I want to be so perfectly focused that I know exactly what my body is doing at all times and am not distracted by things like: what other people think of my playing, whether I'm going to make that shift, etc.

I just made up a new exercise to get myself into that totally calm, focused, relaxed state. It worked so well it was scary, so I tried it on 6 of my students. It's a winner. One student played a passage, then followed my directions and did the exercise, played the passage again, and looked at me, dumbfounded: "why does that work?" "I don't know," I said, "but it's cool, isn't it?"

The purpose of The Magic Forehead is to practice focusing your mind in a relaxed way and to get used to forming a mental picture of what your body is doing, even when you're not looking at it with your eyes.

I'd suggest getting someone to read this out loud to you so you can do it with your eyes closed (or record yourself saying the steps and then play the recording).

Once you're using the big muscles to shift, it's time to improve your aim. Here's a magical way to do that:

1. Deep breath, float your shelf


2. Counterbalance: let shoulders slide down in back


3. Shoulders down in back means arms float up in front of you


4. Toss violin onto your floating shelf


5. With floating shelf and arms, feel like you could hula hoop with your pelvis


6. Find your forehead

OK, now you're ready. Put your "forehead mind" on your stomach. Now play 0-3-1, shifting into 3rd position (1 goes where the 3 usually goes) with the big muscles. As you let your armpit/elbow come closer to shift you into 3rd position, can you let your stomach stay quiet?

There it is, simple as that. Part 3 of Elegant Shifting will have to wait for a while, because I need to talk about finger motion first. Stay tuned!

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.

A few weeks ago I was trying to teach myself spiccato, which no one so far has been able to teach me, and no one has been able to figure out why I can't do it. Now I can--or I almost can: I just need some more mileage to get it consistent.

Anyway, while I was trying everything I could think of to get myself "in the zone" for spiccato, I discovered a way to consistently get the kind of bow-to-string contact I wanted without losing the loose left hand finger technique I needed. It's a different feeling than thinking "finger, bow, go" in Suzuki, though it achieves the same result. Try this:

1. Put on Sandwich #1 and Sandwich #2
2. Now, with your bow on the string (try the A string first), balance your right arm and your bow so that your bow feels like it is exactly in the same plane of balance as your left hand. Use the balance you feel in your left hand and try to match that plane in your bow.
3. Let your bow balance sink slightly lower than your left hand balance--just a touch!
4. As you play: now that your bow is balanced, its work is done. Your loose left hand fingers are now in charge--let them tell the bow when to go.

This sounds really simple, but there's something about thinking about it this way that has made a number of my students suddenly have a perfectly focused, relaxed sound.