VIBRATO
If your set-up is strong and flexible you should be able to vibrate in a musically integrated way. Your vibrato should augment your musical choices and offer a more colorful palette for your sound matrix than your right hand alone can create. Vibrato is your left hand’s main expressive tool!
It is useful to record yourself to listen singluarly for vibrato consistency—listen for random dead notes, a too-wide vibrato, or a too-fast vibrato for the sound you are looking for, or anything inconsistent with your musical intent. Ideally the vibrato doesn’t stick out at all, but augments, underscores, and clarifies your musical ideas. If there’s a note you don’t vibrate or a note you get a little carried away with you probably do it every time. It’s worth doing a quick check to guard against something idiosyncratic. You can re-listen to your same recording for other things once you have listened solely to the vibrato to make sure it is what you intend.
My college teacher Erick Friedman, beloved student of Heifetz, counseled a constant vibrato size, varying only the speed of the vibrato. This does not mean you wiggle your fingers the same amount all over the fingerboard, but that you maintain the change of pitch as a percentage of a 1/2 step the same from every note. This means that down low on the fingerboard your vibrato would feel wider to your left hand and narrower two octaves up. Sing low and high in your voice and you might be able to hear the way a pitch variation should sound constant. (Singers will notice the same thing with their instruments we notice with ours—that the size changes with range changes!) I have always tried to make sure my vibrato sounds the same to my audience without broadcasting to them that the spacing of the fingerboard changes. Of course, you should not play in a boring way, but you should be able to maintain a consistent sound across the fingerboard and then use the tool of vibrato mindfully to add color and excitement. You cannot claim to be in charge of your vibrato unless you can make it sound the same across the instrument before you add variation. Mr. Friedman’s approach is a great entry point to master vibrato.
Vibrato always happens below the pitch. The human ear hears the highest pitch of the wiggle as THE PITCH; if you vibrate above the pitch you will just sound sharp.
Some people advocate vibrating before you start the sound. This is a way to make sure you don’t have a plain sound at the beginning of every note before you vibrate, or at the beginning of every phrase. I rarely recommend this because it can lead to an unclean start to the sound. Anything that affects where your string and bow meet each other will affect the when they meet each other. With exquisitely precise playing you may sound late or early if you are wiggling your finger and therefore the string; early or late, it will be slightly unpredictable. As a rule, I recommend coordinating your left and right hands to launch the sound and the vibrato at the same time. It is rare to need a very zingy vibrato and a slow bow speed, or a slow vibrato with a very fast bow speed. However, If you want to have the vibrato going before you make a sound with the bow please be sure you do not let it disrupt the stroke.
Learn how to integrate vibrato into your shifts. As I travel around the fingerboard I anchor my left hand with my first finger. My anchor needs extra reminders to vibrate before and after a shift. Learn your own habits and then manage them.
To help with a pinky vibrato consider keeping your third finger down nearby and vibrating it with your fourth finger. You can also play a pitch with your third finger to play the sound you want to hear and then play it with your fourth finger, aspiring to make it indistinguishable from 3. Having a great imagination is the first step to sounding great. You can be your own inspiration. Don’t neglect your pinky vibrato—make it great! Three-finger viola is much harder than four-finger viola.