do small hands imply higher difficulty in learning violin?
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Hi, i’m 22 this year. my hands could barely play an octave on piano and certainly it poses great difficulties when i’m learning pieces for the fellowship diploma. i would love to take up violin and wonder if my small hands would pose the same difficulty when playing violin pieces at higher grades?
There are advantages and disadvantages in having small hands when playing violin. Unfortunately the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. But usually it you won’t see the disadvantages until you reach the advanced levels.
The nice thing about violin, though, is that there are multiple ways of playing the same note, which means that most of the time you can find ways around the problem. Violin is a lot more flexible than piano (but it’s also way harder!)
advantages:
-being able to squeeze 2 fingers really close to another (for example, when trying to play two notes on two different strings at the same time, or in the higher positions where notes are close to each other)
-easier to trill
disadvantages:
-vibratos have to be bigger with more arm motion
-hard to stretch to reach notes when you need to in more advanced music
-smaller finger width= cannot press down 2 strings at a time with one finger, especially in higher positions where the strings are further apart from each other.
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Filed under: learning violin
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Small hands should not cause a problem with the violin. You don’t make the same long reaches that you have with the piano.
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No because the violin is so small, and instead of long reaches, you have position shifts where the whole hand moves up.
In fact, the higher grades you go, the further up the fingerboard the positions go, and the closer together the fingers have to be.
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Small hands won’t be a problem, having thin fingers can make some technical passages easier since they can be closer together.
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As a music major in University I had to take 6 weeks of each instrument. Violin and cello were difficult to almost impossible because of my small hands. In my experiance, I’d say try something else.
Nancy
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It just depends on your personal abilities and dexterity, much moreso than the size of your hands. The former concertmaster for my university’s orchestra is a very thin, small woman with smallish hands, and she had no problems with violin; when she was studying cello, she had some issues, but it wasn’t a big thing.
When I played violin (back in "the day"), my small hands didn’t cause issue, either.
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I honestly think it’s easier if you have small hands. I have larger hands for a woman, and i always joke that i have ‘viola hands’ because i have issues with how close my fingers need to be once i get above 5th position. So honestly, I’d rather have small hands.
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Just get a small violin? they come in different sizes you know.
References :
http://musiced.about.com/od/beginnersguide/a/vsizes.htm
There are advantages and disadvantages in having small hands when playing violin. Unfortunately the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. But usually it you won’t see the disadvantages until you reach the advanced levels.
The nice thing about violin, though, is that there are multiple ways of playing the same note, which means that most of the time you can find ways around the problem. Violin is a lot more flexible than piano (but it’s also way harder!)
advantages:
-being able to squeeze 2 fingers really close to another (for example, when trying to play two notes on two different strings at the same time, or in the higher positions where notes are close to each other)
-easier to trill
disadvantages:
-vibratos have to be bigger with more arm motion
-hard to stretch to reach notes when you need to in more advanced music
-smaller finger width= cannot press down 2 strings at a time with one finger, especially in higher positions where the strings are further apart from each other.
References :