As I move through Suzuki Book 2 repertoire on the violin, I’m beginning to spend more time practicing my vibrato. It’s an unnatural movement. The finger has to keep the string pressed against the fingerboard while also relaxing enough at the second joint so it can roll back and forth, changing the pitch.
Violin teachers have come up with all sorts of creative ways to teach vibrato. “String polishing,” “peg knocking,” supporting the scroll with the wall, creating wild siren “wah-wah” sounds, and on and on. These are all helpful for the basic physical mechanism of vibrato.
Yet none of these seems to help me as much as simply listening to a great musician play with vibrato, and trying to do the same. (Here’s a great example.)
Ultimately, it’s the sound that matters, and learning to create a sound by imitation might be one of the superpowers of the human brain. This is how we learn to speak: not by receiving instructions on how to move our lips and tongue, but by hearing the sounds our parents make and trying to match them.
This comes up all the time with my private students who are learning jazz. They want to learn how to solo more like Wynton Kelly, for example. I tell them it’s simple: transcribe Wynton Kelly. When you transcribe, you learn the notes of a solo by ear and then play them on your instrument.
Transcribing something yourself is so different from playing another person’s transcription. When you transcribe, a bunch of things happen at once:
you come to understand the theory behind the notes of the solo
you develop technical proficiency
you have to sit and listen to the same goddamn 10 seconds of music over and over again to figure out what’s going on
I actually think it might be that last part that has the biggest impact. The notes of the solo are important, sure. Those are like the words of a language. But it’s those other, ineffable qualities that make somebody like Wynton Kelly sound so great: his touch, articulation, time feel. Those qualities are like the accent of a native speaker.
The only way to learn the accent is to have a conversation with somebody who’s fluent. That’s why we really only learn to play jazz well by listening to records, transcribing, and playing with other musicians.
My vibrato practice has reminded me of this, and inspired me to constantly listen to aural models throughout my practice: for intonation and tone as well as vibrato. Playing the same passage over and over by myself in my apartment - that’s like trying to learn Italian by repeating phrases to yourself in solitude. It’s in conversation that we learn to speak.
All of this has been making me think of this article by The Bulletproof Musician on studies looking at external vs internal focus - highly recommend if you want some further reading!
Until next time,
Ted
beautiful! thank you for sharing