Violin Video Lesson: How much pressure does it take to push the string down to make a soun...

Hi and welcome to virtualsheetmusic.com's, Meet the Expert. My name is William Fitzpatrick and I am professor of violin at The Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music at Chapman University in Orange, California. Today, I thought we could talk about how much pressure or force it takes to push the string down to make a sound. How much pressure or more importantly, force it would take to do this? Well, the first thing that we might really consider is that pressure is in no way squeezing. By squeezing, I mean the use of muscles in our fingers that might not necessarily be needed to accomplish what we are trying to achieve. What we are trying to achieve is to get the string to vibrate on the upper part. What we are trying to achieve is to get the string to vibrate on the upper part from our finger, not the lower part. So we need enough force to stop the vibration from occurring on that lower part. Now, I don't know if you've noticed or not, but I think you probably have, strings have gotten stronger. In my day, the string was gut wound with aluminum; that was the big thing. And before that, it was just gut. Now, the string, that inner core is synthetic, which makes it a lot stronger. As well, the distance or the projection between the string and the fingerboard has gotten larger. What all of that means is that the fingerboard is no longer that opposing force that it was needed to get the string to not vibrate in that lower part. In other words, we don't need to go all the way to the fingerboard. Now, this reminds me of a story that was told to me by my teacher, Ms. Dorothy Dulay, while I was a student at the Julliard School. She said to me, "Okay, Billy. Do you have a really good imagination?" And I went, "Of course." Then she said, "Well, the distance between the string and the finger board, let's say that it's the Empire State Building." "Fine." Then she said, "How many stories are there on the Empire State Building?" And I said, "I have no idea. Maybe 150?" She goes, "Very good. 150 floors." Here we go. My finger is King Kong. Yes, King Kong from the movie and at the end of that movie, King Kong jumps off the Empire State Building. He hits the ground and he bounces up. She said, "That's what your finger should do. Your finger should go to the string, take it down to maybe the 10th floor and then bounce up to maybe the 30th and that's where it stays." When you do this, the sound that occurs is called, "ping." Let's hear it. Do you hear that ping? Well, my students, some of them are a bit skeptical, especially my French students when I first started to talk about this. They would look at me and go, "Mais messieur?" If we don't press the string down, there is no sound." Well, I developed this little thing, which is a piece of paper and I take the paper and I put it underneath the string between the string and the fingerboard. Now, I am going to make a sound. Can this paper go underneath my finger? Yes. It can go underneath my finger while I am playing this sound. So what do you think about that? I didn't go all the way to the fingerboard to make a sound. Well, that's it for this video. If you have any questions, comments or special requests, please feel free to post them on the comments section. See you next time.

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