Cello Video Lesson: Vibrato on the Cello

Hello, this is Joseph Mendoes, a cello expert for virtualsheetmusic.com with another teaching video. I hope all of you enjoyed my last two videos, I really appreciate all of the comments. Everyone is asking some wonderful questions and I hope my answers are helping. Anyway, so many of you have asked now for a video on vibrato, so I'm gonna try my best to do one. This is a very difficult topic. As most of you know there's a lot of competing theories and different things. And so what I'd basically like to talk about is some of the fundamentals behind vibrato, because I think mastering these fundamentals is incredibly important before you really can start to attempt vibrato and start to understand what it means to actually play with vibrato.

The first fundamental has to do with how we get the string down in the first place. Getting the string down, it needs to be something that is very efficient and very balanced. First of all the string needs to be all the way down, that's bottom line, in order for vibrato to really work. If it's not all the way down we end up kind of distorting the pitch, we slide on top of the note and this is not really, at least in my opinion, musically desirable. However, if we pressed too hard, if we're pressing especially and for squeezing with the thumb, we're pressing really hard, then when we try to vibrate we get a very pinched sound and the vibrato doesn't have kind of a natural feel to it.

So what I just mentioned about the thumb, we'll talk about that, the thumb really needs to be free. And I remember when I learned vibrato I actually taught it to myself. I was very impatient, I remember I was in sixth grade or seventh grade or something like that. I must have been, I don't know, 11 or 10. It must have been 11, yeah, and I saw the principal cello at my school orchestra using vibrato, and I'm sure it wasn't very good. But I so desperately wanted to do it so I emulated him but I couldn't figure out how to do it so what I did was this, I remember I just took my thumb off completely like this. I don't know how I figured that out, but I just took my thumb off completely and I thought, "Oh, without the thumb I can move around a lot." And so I learned how to vibrate that way. It wasn't a very efficient vibrato, it wasn't very good sounding vibrato, but it was a vibrato, it was something that was working.

And I didn't realize how close I had gotten it because my vibrato...once I switched teachers to the man I consider to be my number one mentor, he really taught me a really good way to vibrate and it wasn't that far off what I already was doing. I was squeezing with my thumb a little bit and there were a few other little tweaks that needed to be made. But that's the biggest thing, that if you're a beginner or intermediate and you are struggling with vibrato, the first thing that you can do is just getting that thumb out of the equation, that can help quite a bit. And then of course you can reintroduce the thumb and get it to the point where you can put it behind the neck without really clutching the cello and just kind of let it rest there.

So the other thing is getting the string down. Now there's a lot of ways, a lot of different strategies to get string down, and I'll tell you what mine is. I think that the fingers should be curved, I'm a curved fingers guy. I think you should play closer to the tips of the fingers generally speaking, a little bit more on the tips when you're playing fast, but when you're playing slow even then your fingers shouldn't be too flat like this and too much on this lower part of the finger. You should be generally a little bit more on the tip and these fingers this way should ever buckle. I think that a good vibrato means that all the joints are able to move, they won't all necessarily move but they will be able to move, and especially this first knuckle needs to be able to flex slightly in the vibrato motion. And you'll see that if I play a note, you'll see if I slow down the motion you can see, at least I hope you can see that this first joint is actually flexing quite a bit, and it's that way for all of my fingers when I'm vibrating. So that's really important as well. So curved fingers and no pressure from the thumb.

Then the thing I wanna talk about is this idea of balance that I alluded to in the beginning, and I'm sorry for jumping around here but this is how my brain works. This issue of balance, well balance has to do within the left hand, it has to do with maintaining a proper ratio between strength and flexibility. This is a basic, core concept I think not just in cello playing but in string playing. It has to do with the bow, and your bow hold needs to be this way, it needs to be again in the proper balance between flexibility and strength. Too much strength and then it limits flexibility, too much flexibility and it limits strength. And flexibility and strength are two things that you need in both the left hand and the bow.

So this balance is very important. This balance, if it's out of whack then it's gonna affect your vibrato. As I said earlier, if you're too flexible and there's not enough strength, then probably the string is not getting all the way down and you're gonna get this very wobbly vibrato where the finger is sliding around all over the top of the string again which is in my opinion not musically desirable. In the other direction if you're squeezing too much, there's too much strength, that limits your flexibility, that means that the vibrato itself will feel tight and constrained. What we want is we wanna be able to stay on the pitch and to vibrate as wide as possible but without causing any problems with the pitch. So that's when we know we're in the proper balance between strength and flexibility, which I think is probably something like this. Where you can clearly tell what the pitch is but the vibrato is as wide as it possibly can be.

I think most of the great cellists had this mastered very well. And while we have lots of varieties of different sounds and different approaches, they all basically have this in common, that the vibrato always found this balance, or if it didn't find the balance, then it was either restricted in terms of strength or it was made too flexible because of an artistic desire to do so, that they wanted the vibrato to sound either kind of tight and constrained which I sometimes do, or they want the vibrato to sound over vibrated, which in some pieces is actually called for. But I don't think either of those things should be a basic part of your sound.

So let's see, I've covered the strength, flexibility and balance. Oh, this other thing, the angling of the finger. Now, when you're playing a piece that is a little bit fast, what you need to do is you need to be able to stay very much on top of all the notes that you need to play, so your fingers need to be hovering. If I wanna play a really fast scale, you can see my fingers are staying right above where they need to be. However, when I vibrate, I'm gonna change at that position.

I'm gonna feel the change of balance between one finger to the next to ensure that the vibrato is able to go from note to note. So this is very important as well. So as you can see there's so many facets to being able to vibrate not only well on one note but well on all the notes, all the notes. Listen to me, all the fingers and also all the notes as well because ideally we should be able to vibrate with the same fullness and with the same perfect ratio between strength and flexibility on all the notes. I think this is really, really critical when it comes to vibrato.

So let me think if there's anything else here. I think I've covered everything I wanted to cover about vibrato. I know there's a lot of specific questions like some of you...I know some of you in thumb position probably have some difficulty vibrating especially your first finger, and that would be something that would be perfect to leave in the comments section, I can address very specific comments to that. But let me just review then what we've covered as far as fundamental things, in terms of getting the string down, that thumb cannot be a part of it. If the thumb is squeezing up in order to get the string down, it's gonna seriously limit your vibrato because of what I spoke about, that ratio. That ratio of strength to flexibility, it will be totally out of whack, it will be too strong. However, on the other end of it if you're too flexible you won't stay on the pitch. So you need to find that balance and that's really the key here for vibrato.


And there's something else I forgot to do too as well at the beginning. There's an exercise I do with my beginner students, because I do teach vibrato pretty early, and one of the things that I do is I have them just play second finger really anywhere. I think the most comfortable place to learn vibrato is actually just somewhere down here in either third or fourth or even fifth position, it's pretty comfortable, and I generally use the second finger because the second finger for most people is the strongest finger. So I have them put the second finger down and then I stand off to the side over here, and I shake their finger like that while they're playing with the bow. And this is very, very helpful exercise to get them to really feel this ratio of strength to flexibility. And if their thumb is squeezing a lot I have them hold their thumb out of here. And I told them that what their job is is to make sure that as I'm shaking wildly like this, that the finger is not moving, that it's not sliding around like that but it's staying stationary in the same place. This teaches them the appropriate strength that they need to actually keep the string down and to keep it in the same spot, but also the appropriate flexibility that's needed to actually play with vibrato.

So I hope all this was helpful. I know I jumped around a little bit in this video, but again vibrato is such a complicated topic, it's sometimes necessary to approach it from some different angles. So please feel free to leave your comments in the comments section, and thank you so much for viewing this video, and again I can't wait to hear all of your comments, I hope that we have a nice, heated discussion, I know vibrato is a contentious subject. And please if there's something that I forgot to cover then please ask and maybe I can even do it in a whole separate video or I can address it in the comments section. But either way please keep those comments coming and I look forward to hearing what all of you have to say. Thanks again, this has been Joseph Mendoes with virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'll see you again soon.

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