Staccato · From Zero to Mozart

Staccato means short and separated — each note clipped well under its written length, then silence, with the bow staying on the string between notes. On the violin, the plainest staccato is basically a small martelé: the same prepare–bite–stop, just less bow and a quicker release.

On the page

A dot above or below the notehead. (Remember from Stage 2: a dot beside the notehead is a duration dot — a completely different thing.) The dot doesn't tell you how short or how hard — the tempo and the style do that.

72 bpm

How to play it

Middle of the bow, small strokes. A little catch at the start of each note, a short travel, a clean stop. The stop is on the string — the bow doesn't lift.

Staccato dots, separate bows — down, up, down, up. Each note short and clean, the bow stopping on the string between them. Crisper and lighter than martelé, not hammered.

Two kinds

Separate-bow staccato — one bow direction per note, as above. Start here. It's a short martelé and it's a real, usable stroke.
Slurred (one-bow) staccato — staccato dots written under a slur: a whole string of short, bitten, stopped notes all in the same bow direction, the bow travelling in tiny stop-starts. This is a virtuoso stroke (Wieniawski, Paganini) and even professionals argue about how it works. Recognise it on the page; don't drill it now.

88 bpm

Slurred staccato: eight short notes, one up-bow, the bow inching along in little stops. This is the far-shore version — know it when you see the slur-with-dots, and move on.

Staccato is not spiccato

Both give you short notes, but:

Staccato — the bow stays on the string. It's an on-string stroke you can do now.
Spiccato — the bow leaves the string, bouncing. That's a later stroke (spiccato).

If the dots are in a slow or moderate passage, they mean on-string staccato. In a fast, light Classical passage they usually mean spiccato. The tempo and era decide — same as Stage 3 said about every ambiguous mark.

Try it

Try

Open D, four separate-bow staccato notes: small catch, short stroke, clean stop, repeat. Then a G major scale, one staccato note per bow, all crisp and even. Then play the same scale détaché and switch between the two on a signal — hear the difference between "connected" and "clipped".

The usual mistake

Making staccato as heavy as martelé — a row of hammer blows when the music wants something light and pointed. Staccato is crisp, not hard. The other mistake: lifting the bow off the string to get the note short. That's an off-string stroke, and it's harder to control — keep the hair on the string and just stop it.