Nathan Cole, violin: spiccato coordination

I use the last page of Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso to show the difference in timing between slurred and spiccato passages. See examples side by side and in slow motion!

TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, I’m Nathan Cole of http://www.natesviolin.com, and today we’re going to look at spiccato coordination.

All right, that was a lot of spiccato notes! And to play them cleanly, you need a basic clean spiccato…

one element of the spiccato that a lot of folks often forget about is the coordination between the two hands, the timing between the two hands. And it’s not simply a matter of fast fingers, or even of exactly synchronizing the fingers and the bow. Because with the spiccato the finger has to be down and ready before the bow stroke. If we were to slow this passage down, which I’m going to do in just a minute with some special effects, this might be what you’d see: the first finger is down to start the passage.

And that’s because the string has to be stopped before the bow makes contact. Of course, in a slurred passage, the timing between the fingers and the sound is an exact correlation.

Did you notice how, as soon as the finger stopped the string, the new note sounded? And that’s pretty clear if you think about it: you draw a long bow, the string is vibrating, as soon as the finger comes down, the note changes. And it’s the same as well for simple detache:
One of the first things that we learn, in fact, is to synchronize the changing of the fingers and the changing of the bows exactly; that’s how we get clean bow changes.

Now, you may know already that practicing two extremes can be a nice way to clean up normal coordination problems. If you practice the bow being late, practice the bow being early, then you can usually fine-tune that coordination to get it exact for simple detache playing.

But spiccato presents a different wrinkle, because the bow is not always on the string! And so to stop the string completely and clearly before the bow comes down, that becomes the object of spiccato:

So I have my handy metronome, or metronome app as it were, here, and I’m going to set my tempo at 112 so that I can synchronize a couple things for you. I’d like to show you exactly what it looks like, the two strokes side by side: slurred, which would be the exact timing of the fingers, and spiccato, where the fingers come down early.

Now if I slow this down to half speed, and it’ll sound an octave down, you can start to see the difference in the timing between these two.

Now even slowed down to half speed, it can be difficult to really see and hear the difference in timing. At one-quarter speed, the notes will be almost unrecognizable, but what I want you to pay attention to is the difference between when the spiccato finger goes down and when the new note sounds.

So there you have it: the difference in timing between spiccato playing and all other playing! Now, how do you develop that? Practice the fingers moving early (or the bow moving late): that really drills that timing.

The other way to go about it is a really ingenious — I read this in Simon Fischer’s books. And he suggests practicing such passages pizzicato. Because when we play pizzicato we instinctively use the correct timing. We know, somehow, that we need to stop the string with the left hand first. I think it’s that immediate connection between the right hand and the string that you only get with pizzicato that lets you really feel the timing.

You would just never try to pluck the string without your left hand having stopped it first. The only downside there is you’ve really got to develop a fast pizzicato technique, which is not a bad thing to go for anyway.

I’d love for you to go try these suggestions, clean up your own spiccato, get it really fast and coordinated. I’m Nathan Cole of http://www.natesviolin.com.