This is an exercise to help you hold your bow naturally. You will use a fork because:

• The flat handle of the fork gives you a lot of surface area so your fingers will feel secure


• The fork is very lightweight


• You can eat with a fork

For one week (or more!) you will be eating with a salad (short) fork held in a special way. Let's get started. Click on the photos to get a larger view.

#1: Hold the fork in your left hand by the tines. Start by flipping the fork over and placing the tip of your pinky at the base. (Note that in this picture, I'm not holding by the tines because I needed my hand to snap the photo).

#2: Now lay the handle of the fork against your forefinger, between the first and second creases. Keep your right hand comfortably curved and relaxed. You are still controlling the fork with your left hand.

#3: Let your other fingers curl around the handle. You are still holding the fork with your left hand.

#4: Take your thumb and place it on the handle so it lines up with your middle finger. To do this comfortably, it will have to contact the fork on the corner of the thumb that is closer to your forefinger. Now you can release the fork tines from your left hand. It will look like this:

#5: In order to eat while holding the fork like this, your right shoulder/armpit must be completely relaxed. Try and you will see that this is true. Can you eat like this and keep your right hand and shoulder relaxed? I bet you can! :-) To get it to your mouth, you'll need to swing your elbow in and let it carry your hand around so the fork faces your mouth.

This allows you to practice your bow hold in a controlled way while doing something you already have to do: eat. Do this for at least a week.

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).

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

You should feel absolutely great standing there with plenty of breath going through you, air in your armpits, floating, focused.

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:

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!

"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. :-)

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.

A relaxed bow hold is important, but true relaxation can only come after you have developed the muscles in the right hand. Below is how I ask my students to form their bow holds, and an exercise that they can do while sitting (for example, when they're watching TV and a commercial comes on).

Eventually this will have pictures, when I can get one of my friends to stand over my shoulder with a camera...

Setting up the Bow Hold

1. clip your fingernails!


2. sit on the floor with your legs crossed under you.


3. if you hold your right hand in front of your face loosely with your thumbnail pointing towards you, the top corner of your thumb is what will be touching the stick (wood part) of the bow.


4. OK, hold the bow in your left hand, tip pointing left. Move your left arm so that it crosses your body, bringing the bow out to the right of you. You'll see why in a few steps.


5. with your right hand knuckles up, fingers pointing away from you, bend your thumb slightly and put the thumb corner between the stick and the hair of the bow, so that the tip of the thumb just touches the black plastic/ebony. The thumb should not go inside the U-shaped hole in the black plastic/ebony.


6. drop the 2nd and 3rd (ring) fingers onto the stick so that the 2nd finger is over the thumb. The fingers are pretty straight and are touching the stick in the middle section of the finger. Your hand will look like a shadow puppet animal.


7. let those fingers (the animal's "nose"), curve now, so that they bend down and touch the black part of the bow.


8. to the right of the 2nd and 3rd fingers, you will see that your bow [probably] is not perfectly round, but has distinct faces. Put your pinky next to your other fingers, on the face that is in back of the top face (the "back shelf"). You should have plenty of room to do this, because your bow is all the way to the right, leaving you more space to place the pinky.


9. let your 1st (pointer) finger go wherever it wants for now, and maybe forever!


10. now gently move your left arm left so that your bow hand is resting on your right knee. You'll see that it will make your pinky curve more on the bow.


11. relax everything in your right arm.


12. lift your hand slightly off your knee and feel the balance in your right hand between the thumb and the pinky. Can you balance the bow between them? Both thumb and pinky remain curved.


13. with right hand back down on your knee and right arm/shoulder relaxed, press down with the pinky as if you're typing on a computer keyboard. The tip of the bow will rise. This is a "pinky pushup". Do several of these until your hand needs a rest or you lose the bow.