The fourth violin position is a valuable tool when playing scales and orchestral repertoire. The third position may already feel so high up that you don’t want to think about anything that is even higher. Certainly the fourth position has some difficulty and it’s not for beginners, but by mastering it, you have another valuable [...]

Carl Flesch was a legendary violin teacher who created a scale system used by most classical violinists today. His books and teachings have had a huge influence on modern violin playing because they directly help us learn difficult repertoire. If you're advancing on the violin and would like to dive into scales, read on to [...]

“Range” in music, when talking about an instrument’s or a voice’s range, is the distance from the lowest to the highest note. In short, how many notes and at what pitch an instrument can play. If you think of the string instruments from the violin family as a choir, the violin would be the soprano as [...]

Even though the violin is mostly used to perform solo pieces or to play in an orchestra, we can play chords on it. Sometimes in a higher level solo piece there are chords written in, or you may want to play chords as an accompaniment for another instrument or a singer. Depending on the context, [...]