Third position

3rd position is the easiest position to add after 1st — and not by accident. Its hand-frame is an exact copy of the one you already have.

Wherever your 3rd finger used to land, that's home now

In 1st position, your 3rd finger already visits every one of these notes. 3rd position just picks the whole hand up and sets it down there, so the 3rd finger's old spot becomes the 1st finger's new spot — and every low/high-finger habit you've already built (low-2, high-2, and so on) transfers across unchanged.

String	1st finger in 3rd position
G	C
D	G
A	D
E	A

54 bpm

1st finger, 3rd position, one note per string. This is the whole note map for this position — everything else is the same hand-frame you already know, just picked up and set down here.

The self-check: an octave, not a unison

On three of the four strings, the 3rd-position note shares its letter name with an open string — sounding a clean octave above it, not the same pitch. Play the 3rd-position note and the open string together and listen for a ring with no beating:

50 bpm

How to play it

Play each pair together, bow crossing both strings. Listen for a smooth, still ring — an out-of-tune octave beats noticeably, faster the further off you are.

Each 3rd-position note stacked against the open string that shares its letter name: D string's G against open G, A string's D against open D, E string's A against open A. A clean octave rings without beating — if it wavers, the 3rd-position finger has drifted.

The G string is the one exception — its 3rd-position note (C) has no open string to check against, since there's no open C string. You'll rely on ear and muscle memory there, the same way you already do for the low-2/high-2 choice in 1st position.

Reading `III`

You'll start seeing a small roman numeral III over notes in real editions from here on. It means exactly what Stage 3 told you it could mean and what what-a-position-is just made physical: the hand sits in 3rd position for this passage. reading-a-position-number, next, walks through it properly.

Try it

Try

Shift from 1st position up to 3rd on each string in turn (open, then 1st finger up to the 3rd-position note). Check the D, A and E strings against their matching open string for a clean octave. Then play the four 3rd-position notes across all four strings, back to back — G string included, by ear alone.

The usual mistake

Guessing at 3rd position by feel alone, without ever checking it against something you can hear precisely. The octave self-check exists because "close enough" isn't checkable by eye — your ear is the only thing that can tell you the hand actually arrived.