Violin Video Lesson: My FingeringBoard Journey: Introduction

I believe that you've never lived till you've seen a five and a half to six and a half year old play a one octave scale in any position with ease after just six months or so of lessons.

So how is that possible? I mean, just how did I get these young beginners to do it? Well, explaining that and more is what my fingering board journey is all about.

But first, here is perhaps what you might consider an odd question.

Do any of you remember the movie The Wizard of Oz? Well, I remember it as it was one of my favorites, but I can't tell you how disappointed I was to find out that the wizard was in fact a projection.

Hiding behind a curtain, behind the projection was a man pulling and pressing the knobs and buttons which brought the projection of the wizard to life. Well, one of the major lessons that I learned from that movie was that it's probably best to first look behind the curtain to see what's really going on.

It's with that in mind that I'd like to look behind my curtain and at the journey which led to the making of my fingering board. And subsequently, how I learned to go even deeper, how I learned to use it even more.

So in 1980, I was hired to teach a violin studio, 32 students at the Conservatory of Music in Leveloir-Perin, which is a suburb of Paris. I felt that I needed a bit more guidance, so I asked a few of my more experienced colleagues what they taught that they believed accounted for the success of their students.

Well, I was totally stunned by their responses as they all said the same thing. They all said scales.

One of them even said that they would start each of their students' lessons with them playing all the scales in the circle of fifths. Well, seriously I was surprised. You see, personally, I so disliked practicing scales. But despite my prejudice, I decided to explore scales anyway.

I decided to try and understand why they all answered the same way, to try and understand their reasoning behind it. In other words, to just try and understand why scales.

So as scales are made through the organization of whole and half steps, I decided to create something more visually oriented, something I hoped my students could more easily relate to. And with that, my fingering board was born.

The first one looked like this... It was not, however, meant to be an accurate representation of whole and half step distances, but to visually convey this concept.

To start, I connected my fingering board to scales based on tetrachords. Tetra meaning four and chords meaning notes. In scales, they are called lower and upper tetra chords.

I used to get a kick out of asking students how many fingers they had on their left hand. Some would say five. And I would correct them saying that they only had four with a thumb. That a thumb was not a finger as it was a thumb.

Those were the fingers. I would use this observation as a way to show the different patterns one could make with those fingers. Then I would show them the correlation between those finger patterns and patterns that can reflect those found in the tetra chords used in scales.

As time went by, I started to see even more benefits to this visual approach presented using my fingering board. I started to look at double stops from another perspective, started visually mapping out large distances and more.

So with that, I propose we take a look behind the curtain and reveal what possibilities my fingering board has to offer. You may be surprised.

So as always, do take care and please, please be safe.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.

Post a comment, question or special request:

Comments or questions must be between 3 and 10,000 characters long.

You may: Login  or  

Otherwise, fill out the form below to post your comment:

Add your name below:


Add your email below: (to receive replies, will not be displayed or shared)


For verification purposes, please enter the word MUSIC in the field below

---