56 - Produce A Nice Tone On The Violin - Leopold Auer Series Part 2

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Welcome to the Violin Podcast and welcome to the second episode of our 4th episode series on Leopold Hour.

And we're going to be talking about tone production today.

And tone production is a valuable thing to understand because it helps you get the the right sound out of your violin.

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And tone production is something that is caught and very difficult to teach.

But we're going to dive into some elements as to how you can improve your tone production today.

So let's get right into it with the with the first element.

Obtaining a good tone is not just a physical process or getting the best equipment possible, you know.

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And according to Mr. Our he quotes, to obtain of this quality the student must not only expect to sacrifice whatever time may be necessary, but he must be willing to being the bearer of the problem, all his intelligence, all the mental and spiritual concentration of which he is capable of.

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So you have to obtain a good sound by actually thinking about how that sound is supposed to sound like.

So if you have an idea in your head of what the tone is supposed to be like, that goes back to what we've talked about in the first episode, the self observation.

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If you haven't listened to that episode, I'd encourage you to go back to episode one before you before you listen to this one because a lot of what I'm going to be doing is referencing that first episode as well.

So that way you're you're on track, but obtaining a good sound, obtaining a good tone.

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Very important, because a lot of what I teach especially and a lot of violent teachers who are listening on the violent podcast may relate to this, that your body is your sound.

Because at the end of the day, your violin is just simply a tool to express what you want to say without words.

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And to me, by actually listening to the tone of the violin, that gives me a better opportunity to really play with what I want a particular passage to sound like, whether it's a solo, whether it's an orchestral playing, whether it's chamber music.

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And make sure you're subscribed to the episode, because what we'll be talking about in episode 3 is the importance of nuance.

So I may reference a little bit of nuance in this episode today, but the bulk of that is going to be the next episode, so make sure that you're subscribed for that episode.

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But I digress.

The good tone is not just about equipment.

Some of my students actually don't have the best equipment to begin with, but what I do teach them is the ability to produce the best sound possible on the equipment that they're given.

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Sometimes I get students coming in with violence from eBay, Sometimes I get students coming in with violence from an actual, reputable violin shop.

And it turns out that some students play better on the eBay violin than they do on the more expensive violin from the violin shop.

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So it's important to really set expectations that the equipment is not the the final solution to your problems.

You are actually the solution to your problems and you have to obtain the awareness so that you can produce a good sound on the violin.

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But all of this to say, if you're not familiar with obtaining a good sound or trying to play with a good sound, how on earth do you learn how to do that?

That leads me to my next point.

With Leopold Hour is good.

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Tone is caught, not just taught.

And by having a good teacher explain from his knowledge, the demonstration is a better teacher than information on paper could ever give you.

And on an instrument like the violin, tone production is so important to be able to hear while you're in a lesson.

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And I'm grateful to have had really good teachers growing up because they taught me what things are supposed to sound like what?

What's the difference between a good tone and a bad tone?

A good sound versus bad sound, Scratchy sound versus clear sound.

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Those things can help put perspective on the student, but also the parents that help guide the students on what can be possible when playing the violin.

Because let me tell you this, I've taught enough beginners to know that a lot of parents give up on teaching their kids how to play violin or how to practice violent because they just don't know how to explain what a good tone is.

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And that's why I always suggest having parents be in the violin lesson so they have an idea of what a good tone sounds like so that they can help their their child at home.

And if you're a Conservatory student, that might be kind of a different perspective for you.

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But if you're a teacher, it really helps to have a parent really listen in on the lesson, take notes, kind of have a have them be a family on the wall just so they're not interrupting the lesson, they're not and asking any questions till the end of the lesson.

I found that to be really useful.

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Now I know that may not be the case with every student because some students, they actually get they get rowdier when they're when their parents are in the room.

So I kind of do like a 5050 Sometimes it's good to have them in, sometimes it's good to have them out, just to have that balance.

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But I'm kind of going on a tangent here.

However, it is I cannot be emphasized enough to have good tone because good tone, as Suzuki would say, beautiful tone, beautiful heart, good tone helps you achieve your musical goals on the violin.

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And then continuing on with bullet point #3, which I've already talked about, is a good teacher.

Let's talk about the importance of having a good teacher when it comes to tone production.

As I said, anyone has access to a teacher these days.

You know, you have all sorts of different online companies who started during the COVID-19 pandemic to offer violin lessons.

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Virtually, you have a lot of teachers going back in person, and actually a lot of teachers leaving their positions because they thought that the teaching has just become too overwhelming with the amount of students.

They just can't handle that many students.

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So they kind of loaded off some students.

They can't handle them anymore.

But having a good teacher is really important because it helps give the students guidance to their violin playing.

And it's important because it's acquiring a good tone is with the power and responsibility of the teacher to share and foster that tone.

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Let me repeat that again.

It's important because acquiring a good tone is within the power and responsibility of the teacher to share and foster that tone.

And as a teacher, I am definitely taking that responsibility towards my student.

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I want to be able to share the best possible sound to my students so that way they can achieve their musical goals so that way they have an idea in their head of what it's supposed to sound like.

I'll give you an example.

Yesterday, literally yesterday I had a student coming in with their full size violin.

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The the parent was sitting in the room and we are tuning violin and I was always emphasizing to the student that having a good tone while tuning the violin is important.

So that way you can hear the frequencies between the two intervals you want to have to the violin tune perfect fifth.

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So the E was slightly sharp, a couple cents sharp, and the mom was like, well, I, I how do you teach that?

How on earth do you teach good tone and how do you teach like the ability to listen for those intervals and such minor frequency differences?

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And a lot of that is using my knowledge to explain as best as I can.

The way I explained it is, first of all you need to have a good tone from what I talked about earlier.

So you have to have a steady tone when tuning the violin.

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That's number one.

You got to do that.

And then #2 you have, it's the responsibility of the teacher to demonstrate what is wrong and what is right.

So there may be specific elements in your music that you're learning that serves a specific accent.

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Beethoven is famous for this, that if you find a Forte in Beethoven, he means it.

You cannot do anything else.

You cannot do something that's interpretive, like an interp like interpretation of Forte.

No, like you need to play Forte and the story.

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That's it.

And that is different from composer to composer.

And sometimes a tone may be different in Beethoven versus a tone in Debussy.

A tone in Corngold may be different with the tone in Brahms because each piece of music is trying to achieve a different goals and you cannot transfer over those tones and those sounds all the time.

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And again it's my responsibility to teach that.

So if I'm playing to Vorzak humor Raskin Suzuki book four or sorry Suzuki book 3.

Pardon me if I'm teaching humorous Suzuki book three.

I have to teach the student what that might sound like in the beginning of the lesson.

Now you have to be careful as a teacher when you are demonstrating, so that way you don't demonstrate the wrong way.

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If you're playing out of tune the entire time, then your student obviously will play out of tune.

You don't want that.

You want to be prepared as a teacher to demonstrate the right and correct way with proper sound, proper both technique, both distribution, tone, posture, so that you know, because students are a reflection of their teachers.

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So whatever the teacher teaches the student, they're going to kind of get that in in their violin lessons.

So it is important to have a good teacher that will emphasize little tiny details, emphasize little things.

So let's apply some practical tips to actually achieving a good tone.

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So, slow bow strokes using a full length of the bow, and it is important to go from frog to the tip of the bow because, let's face it, you have paid for the entire bow, you might as well use all of it.

So let's practice using full bows from the beginning of the frog to the tip, making sure that you have a clean, consistent weight, a consistent contact of the the string with the bow hair, and really just trying to achieve a good sound by doing that slowly.

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As I mentioned in episode one, by slow practice, you'll find that you will hear a lot more when you are practicing slowly.

So when you practice slow bow strokes, you are able to work on tone.

Now I like to describe tone kind of like an equalizer.

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You know, the back in the day these Gen.

ZS may not even realize this, but you back in the day we had cars that had like a base equalizer, a mid equalizer and a treble equalizer.

And then you can actually adjust it to your liking, not not adjusting on the computer screen in your car.

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Like I I can do that on my on my screen in my car right now.

But the fact that I was able to kind of do like analog, that was really cool.

So I like to think of tone production from my personal experience as as kind of like that there's a treble, there's a mid and there's a bass equalizer, right.

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And I feel like that, you know, you can get a good sound with mid and the the mid and the treble, but having a decent core to the sound like have imagine there's like a sphere, like a ball and then the core sound is kind of like inside that's like the nucleus of the sound.

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So the core, the core you want to have like a little bit more foundation, like a bit more bass to my ear.

I guess that could be a reason why I gravitate towards darker sounding instruments.

That's just a personal interpretation of how I interpret sound.

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But in addition to that, I want to emphasize the contact point.

And now contact point is the combination of having flexible fingers to grip the string appropriately so that you can pull the string in an efficient manner.

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Now, it's not about pressing into the string.

Sometimes we actually get a crunchier sound or a a scratchy sound when we press in because we're applying weight directly into the sound into the string.

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But by pulling the string to the right, if we're doing a down bow and we're pulling the string to the right, you will actually achieve a nicer tone as a result.

And going up, of course is more difficult.

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So you'll probably be playing on the left side of the violin string, pulling the the violin bow, and then the opposite would occur on the up bow.

You would actually go on the the right side of the string and then do an up bone.

Now you want to maintain that contact throughout your long, slow legato bows to practice that tone.

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And when you're applying these in your skills and your Schradiak exercises, that is going to be the combination of it all, where you're practicing your finger tonality with the right hand, and that's where the right hand and left hand intersect and meet to combine a nice tone.

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When I read this book by Mr. Our he emphasizes this a lot and by listening to high fits, he emphasized this in his playing and he emphasizes in his teaching.

You see all these famous YouTube videos of Yasha Haifa's teaching.

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You know the first thing he asks are scales, right?

How well can you play a scale?

How?

If you can't play a scale, well, then then what's the point of even playing the music?

So given that, I think that we're in a different place as as the pedagogically speaking, at least for me, I don't approach teaching that way.

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However, it is important to note that by, you know, realizing that good tone does not necessarily come from good equipment, good tone is caught not taught, and having a good teacher to really help you guide the the way for a good tone.

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Those are the essential elements for having a good violent sound.

And now, in next week's episode, we're going to be talking about the importance of nuance and phrasing and how applying everything that we learned in episode one and episode 2.

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We're going to go into Episode 3 learning about how nuance is, where the music and the artistry happened.

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