Category: music

The Devil’s Advocate

Everything falls apart and the devil is behind it all.
Excertps from the movie “The Devil’s Advocate” directed by Taylor Hackford (1996; IMDB).

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This recording is kept for historical reasons since it is not recent and I am practising & improving everyday. It is about the development process, not the actual technique.

Wrist vibrato

This video records my main findings after studying the wrist vibrato on the violin for the past few months. This technique involves a number of different factors that I believe should be addressed and developed separately so as to make it easier to develop the proper wrist vibrato.

Hand angle relative to the neck
Finger pressure
Thumb support
Wrist vibration

Its worth noting that it is not enough to do the right things to play the vibrato, because we depend on strenght and flexibility on different parts of the fingers, and these can only be developed in time.

So, if you are doing everything right and still you can’t do the vibrato properly, that is the most likely reason and I believe that my approach here can help you pinpoint the factors that are hindering your performance.

Below is an illustration of the suggested increase in amplitude for the wrist vibrato. This helps avoid a kind of “resonance” that amplifies the violin shaking.

Practising what I preach:

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This recording is kept for historical reasons since it is not recent and I am practising & improving everyday. It is about the development process, not the actual technique.

Dracula’s prey

A walk in the Carpathian forest turns into a nightmare as night falls and Dracula closes in…

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This recording is kept for historical reasons since it is not recent and I am practising & improving everyday. It is about the development process, not the actual technique.

Arthur & Guinevere

A man who fears nothing is a man who loves nothing.

Arthur

I performed these short impressions on the movie First Knight (directed by Jerry Zucker, Columbia Pictures, 1995).

I composed the music except for the two last parts which are free transcriptions from the original works. This has a dark stance on the theme and the chapters are:

I. Guinevere

II. Arthur

III. Marriage

IV. War

V. Arthur mourns Guinevere’s love (1/2)

VI. Arthur mourns Guinevere’s love (2/2) – from the aria “E Lucevan le Stelle” of Puccini’s Tosca

VII. Finale – from “After Dark” by Vadim Kiselev

The stills are from the before mentioned movie. The background image is adapted from the “Victorian Floral” wallpaper collection by Walls Need Love.

I am using the Pirastro Aricore string set which I consider a definite improvement over the standard sets. The most distinctive of these lower tone strings is evident at the end of part III.

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This recording is kept for historical reasons since it is not recent and I am practising & improving everyday. It is about the development process, not the actual technique.