From Zero to Mozart
Stage 7Vibrato & expressionLesson 17 of 27 · Left hand

Vibrato through a shift

Players talk about "continuous vibrato" — a shimmer that never stops. It's a slight fiction. The motion physically pauses every time a finger lifts, a string is crossed, or the hand shifts. What great players actually do is make that pause so short you don't hear it. This lesson is about the gaps.

Where the vibrato stops

  • A finger change on the same string — the old finger's vibrato has to hand over to the new finger's.
  • A string crossing — the hand angle changes and the motion resets.
  • A shift — the hand releases to travel the neck (Stage 6), and a released hand can't vibrate.

The skill is keeping the hand alive into and out of each of these, so the shimmer resumes the instant the new note settles rather than a beat later.

Across a shift

40 bpm

How to play it

Slow bow across both. Keep the vibrato going right up to the moment the hand releases for the shift, and start it again the instant the D arrives and is in tune. Practise the shift itself silently first (Stage 6).

1st finger on B (A string, first position), then the same 1st finger shifted up to D (A string, third position). Vibrate the B; shift; vibrate the D. The aim: the gap where the hand is travelling and not vibrating is as short as possible. Playback gives the two plain notes and the shift between.

The exercises

Simon Fischer's approach, simplified:

  1. Vibrate while changing fingers on one repeated pitch — 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, all on the same note, the vibrato never stopping.
  2. Vibrate across a slow string crossing — a long note on the A string, then the same motion continuing onto a note on the D string.
  3. Vibrate across a slow shift — as above, keeping the dead moment minimal.

Try

On the A string: vibrate a 1st-finger B, then without stopping the shimmer, put down the 2nd finger (C) and let it take over the vibrato, then the 3rd (D). One continuous wobble, three fingers. Then try B up to D with a shift, keeping the gap tiny.

Hear it

In a Romantic concerto slow movement, listen to a phrase that shifts position mid-line — the vibrato barely flickers across the shift. In a beginner recording, the line breaks into separate vibrated beads with dead shifts between. That continuity is the last thing to come.

The usual mistake

Two opposite errors. One: the vibrato dies at every note so the line sounds like a string of separate beads. The other: forcing the vibrato through a shift so hard that the shift itself gets sloppy and out of tune. The shift's accuracy comes first; the continuity is layered on once the shift is reliable on its own.