The position check

This is a self-audit, not a gate (RULES.md #4) — nothing here locks or unlocks anything. Unlike the Foundation check, it doesn't sit at a hard gate either: the Intermediate gate is still ahead, at the end of Stage 8b, after Stage 7's vibrato. This is just an honest look at whether Stage 6's ground is solid before you keep building on it.

What Stage 6 asked of your hand

1 · Find 1st, 3rd and 5th position cold, no notes to check against first. The thumb-touch landmark for 5th, the hand-frame copy for 3rd — both should be muscle memory by now, not a search.

2 · Play a stopped 3rd, a stopped 6th, and an octave, each in tune. Not perfect — in tune enough that the wiggle-to-lock check settles into a still, beat-free ring within a couple of tries.

3 · Hold a simple 3-note stopped chord, spread across three strings, without the shape collapsing before the bow finishes rolling through it.

4 · Trill evenly on at least one finger pair, starting slow and controlled rather than rushed and blurry.

5 · Touch the two easy natural harmonics — the octave and the two-octave — cleanly enough that they ring rather than thud.

6 · Check a shift by degree, not just by feel. This ties straight back to Stage 8's ear gym: when you land a shift, you should be able to tell — by ear, against a drone or an open string — whether you actually arrived on the scale degree you meant to, not just "somewhere that felt about right."

Check yourself

Where this leaves you

If most of that felt solid, the fingerboard is genuinely open to you now — not just in theory, but in the hand. Stage 7 (vibrato) builds directly on this: you can't add a controlled oscillation to a hand that isn't yet secure in the position it's sitting in. If a few things still feel shaky, that's normal for the most purely physical stage this course has asked of you yet — circle back to whichever movement felt least solid before pushing on.