I love to shift. It wasn't always this way.

Preparation
Before I teach shifting, basic beautiful posture and focus must be in place. This means:

1. Scoop and Deposit or Shelf and Pee
2. Counterbalance
3. Forehead

Shifting with the Big Muscles
When you shift "up", it's not really up, it's horizontal. Your hand moves toward your nose (shifting "up") or away from you toward the scroll (shifting "down"). Sometimes it helps to stop saying "up" and "down" and instead shift "across" to the other position. The tendency is to want to raise the left shoulder to do this. Please do the following instead:

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".

I didn't post this, but after a student learns to balance the "float" and the "plop", I will often ask him/her to try to balance the thumb and fingers of the left hand in the same way. It's the fastest, easiest way I've found to loosen up the thumb when putting a finger down makes the thumb take a death grip on the neck of the violin.

With the little kids, they often don't have problems with balancing their arm (yet) because their arms are pretty short in relation to the rest of their bodies, and because they're used to tossing the violin into place from underneath anyway. But they often have a tight thumb because they're trying so hard to get the finger down, and the fingers aren't strong yet. The easiest way to loosen up a left thumb is to talk about how the thumb is on one side of a seesaw and the fingers are on the other, then ask if the thumb and fingers can balance each other so that they're equally loose. Even with weak fingers this is possible, and the concept is simple enough that the kids get it right away.

Once you're relaxed and you're allowing the arm to take your hand back and forth between positions, it's time to refine the shift by adding more grace in your finger movement. Picture this:

You are standing with your feet together. You are about to take a step to the left. Do your legs stay totally straight before you take the step and while you are stepping? Of course not! Before you step left, your knees bend just a little, and you can even push off to the left a little, using your right leg as a little springboard to get you to the left with less effort.

The same thing happens with your fingers. Set yourself up on a finger. This finger will be the springboard that gets you to your next position, wherever it is on the violin. Just before the shift, let the finger bend a little bit, just like your knee would, preparing for the shift. Then, bounce off the finger to start your shift, and let your arm carry your hand the rest of the way. Your shifts, when done with this technique, will suddenly be more graceful, fluid, take less effort, and will land with greater accuracy.

Sometimes it's helpful to picture your fingers as legs, especially after practicing with your legs first, pushing off one foot to get to the next foot.

The accuracy and tone of double stops always improve for me when I concentrate on beautiful motion between each double stop. The technique for doing this involves using the current fingers to bounce you to the next fingers. It's essentially the same technique as I use for finger preparation when shifting. If you can successfully do it with one finger when you're shifting, try using that same finger resiliency when playing double stops. You will immediately notice a huge difference.