violin vibrato

Violin Vibrato: A rapid, minor alteration of a note’s tone or pitch, usually used to add feeling, depth, and emotion to its sound.  In a vocal performance, vibrato adds a little quiver in the voice as if to imitate excitement or melancholy.  In a stringed instrument performance, vibrato mellows the sound of a note and frequently adds depth; also used to in stringed instrument play to add emotion and intensity to the performance.

Violin Vibrato, everyday translation: You wiggle your fingertip as you press your string against the fingerboard, adding a little “tremolo” to the sound of your note. For a beginner, vibrato helps you get closer to the note’s exact sound; for an intermediate, vibrato continues improving your accuracy, and it adds a little style.  For an expert, vibrato becomes the musical equivalent of Tabasco sauce—a very little goes a very long way.

In one of your very first lessons or classes, your teacher will apply tape to your violin’s fingerboard, carefully calibrating and calculating exactly where you must place each finger to produce each of the major notes from your strings.  When you press your fingertip firmly against the string and on the little piece of tape, you should produce a pure, robust note; and as you move your fingers from tape to tape along each string, you should produce a proper-sounding scale.  As you become more proficient with your finger placements, you will learn locations of sharps and flats, producing “chromatic” scales.  Your everyday practice will include lots and lots of scales up and down the fingerboard and all along the octaves, because your violin proficiency depends on development of “muscle memory” in your first three fingers.  In other words, the longer you practice your simple and chromatic scales, the more your fingers will remember where to go as you follow the notes on your printed score. 

Violin vibrato complements all your other fingering and bowing skills

You build your violin vibrato into your repertoire as different pieces require it, as nervousness creates it, or as you think a piece needs a little emotional embellishment.  In simplest and most practical terms, your violin vibrato is your best and most deliberate finger-wiggle against the strings, and its effects will vary according to how quickly you wiggle and where against your tapes you wiggle.  Wiggle relatively slowly against the “bottom” of each tape—that is, the edge closer to the pegs and scroll, and you’ll get a melancholy tone;  wiggle quickly against the top edge of a tape, and your tone will sound both sharper and more excited.

As a beginner, you will produce a lot of vibrato, because your instinct will prompt you to slide your fingers along the strings and fingerboard until you press each note exactly as you should.  Your ears and teacher may punish your for excessive violin vibrato, because proper fingering actually demands sharp, deliberate, decisive placement of each finger against each note on each string.  When you wiggle and wobble, you actually call attention to your mistakes, because you seem to slide into each note.  As you grow from beginner to intermediate, you may hear “pick up and place your fingers!” almost as often as you hear your name called in school.  When you become an intermediate, you more deliberately will  how to use a quick little vibrato here and there to obscure your mistakes.  As your fingering becomes more precise and your digits develop their memories, your violin vibrato will decrease until it becomes a matter of choice instead of desperation.  Then you will be able to say confidently that you know how to vibrato on a violin.