Thomas J. West Music

One of the weaknesses of most beginner method book series for any instrument is that the sequential nature of the material's presentation lends to a very slow approach that is based on learning to read music notation at the same time that the student learns the physical skills necessary to perform the notation they are learning. Because new performing skills are learned at the same time as its notation, you are limited to learning only those performance skills that have been previously covered in the method.

Beginner students of any age are capable of a lot more physical execution than the notation they know how to read. I always begin all of my beginning instrumental students with a regimen of tonal patterns that gets them playing tetrachords and scales very early - long before they ever see them in print.

The Orchestral Instrument Advantage

Beginning string students have an advantage over their wind counterparts: they can immediately produce a large number of pitches on their instrument by learning just a few basic skills. Once a strings student can hold the instrument correctly, use proper technique to perform pizzicato (without the bow), and has the basic position for the fingers on the fingerboard (with or without tapes to help), they are capable of playing several major scales.

I teach string students to play major scales by grouping the scales together based on the finger placement required for those scales. Students begin with a scale practice sheet that I hand out to them as part of their warm-up book. This sheet is quite simple, and contains the scale name and eight blanks for the student to write in the letter names of the pitches that belong to that scale. As they write in the letter names, we identify which steps of the major scale are required to be a half-step apart.

We typically begin, as most beginning string methods do, with D Major. Students write in the pitches, identify the half-steps between F# and G and C# and D, and then connect that directly to the 2nd and 3rd fingers which much touch (for violins and violas) or the 3rd and 4th fingers (for cello and bass). The students can very quickly pluck out a D Major scale in one octave on their instrument.

Grouping Scales By Fingering Shapes

Once the students can play D Major, they automatically already know the finger patterns for G Major - they simply move down one string on the instrument. Violinists can also play the 2nd octave of the A Major scale beginning on the A string, and viola and cello students can also play the C Major scale in the low octave starting on the C string. Teaching these scales and having students write them down on their scale sheet reinforces the key signatures for these scales and the location of the half-steps in a major scale. I call this finger shape the 2-3 shape since the 2nd and 3rd fingers touch and form a half-step for the violin and viola (for cello and bass, it is a 3-4 shape, and the fingers don't physically touch one another).

The second finger shape group that I teach is the 1-2 shape. Since violas and the celli can play C major using the 2-3 shape, violinists first learn the C Major scale in 1-2 shape to be able to play with them. Learning 1-2 shape opens up C Major (low octave), F Major (low octave) and Bb Major (low octave) for violin.

The third finger shape group I use is the 3-4 shape (or extended 4 for cello/bass). Since violins can perform A Major in the 2-3 shape, violas and cellos learn to play A Major in the lower octave. Most method books teach the C# and G# for violin and viola as "extended 3rd finger". I touch on this also, but I immediately link it to establishing a half-step position to the pinky. This gets students over that artificial hurdle created by most method books when the student begins to use their pinky to play pitches instead of relying on the open string.

As scale study continues, students discover that they can easily play two octaves of a major scale by simply using a different finger shape for the bottom two strings than they do for the top two strings. For example, violins can easily play G Major in two octaves in first position using the 2-3 shape for the bottom octave and the 1-2 shape for the top octave.

Learning scales by finger shape also takes the bite out of learning those infamous flat scales that string students dislike. Rather than thinking of playing Eb Major as "low 1, low 2, 3, low 4" on the violin, you can simply tell them to play a 3-4 shape starting on Eb. Once the students learn how to shift out of first positon, the whole universe is opened to them because they can play two octaves of just about any scale using the 3-4 position in the lower octave and the 1-2 position in the upper octave.

Teaching major scales by finger shape enables the student to play multiple keys early on in their development and still understand the music theory behind the scales they are learning. The biggest hurdle for them, like in the Suzuki method, becomes learning how to read those scale patterns in standard notation. I have a method for that, too, but that is for another article.

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