This morning I was looking forward to getting my daughter off to school, having a nice, full practice session, and then sitting down to write.

The best laid plans

Instead, I just finished a penmanship lesson with my daughter, who convinced me that her ‘cold’ was worthy of a day away from school. No, it doesn’t mean we sit around in front of a tv all day. After I get this little note off to you we’ll turn our attention to reading.

My practice session will have to wait.

Here’s the deal with trills. I believe that the ultimate speed at which you are able to trill, is determined by God.

Yet even more importantly – the Clarity, and ultimately the effectiveness of our trill, is completely up to you.

There are people of course who, when you say ‘trill’, give the impression someone just pressed a doorbell. It’s that fast and effortless.

Yet often the challenge that falls to such people is that of getting control or variability to it – a blazingly fast trill can be out of character in some music – a Mozart Andante being one good example.

Most of us are faced with the opposite problem, namely how to develop the finger reflex we’ve been given to convey an impression of something more.

There are two things that enable this – technique and smart planning.

On the technical side you must resist the urge to press the vibrato into service in an attempt to amplify the finger’s natural reflex. Invariably the result of this will be a muddy, featureless blur. I can guarantee, no one is going to be fooled or impressed.

The best approach is always to stay with the finger – keeping it as light and clean as it can possibly be. The more relaxed you are, the better the result.

What you CAN do, after you’ve isolated the finger motion to a high degree, is experiment with the height you take it above the string. Yet in doing so you must remember to keep the hand relaxed, otherwise it will revert back into a knot of frustration.

The other side of the trill coin involves planning.

If you focus on a given pre-determined of oscillations for the trill – assuming it’s duration is a beat or less, and allow yourself to visualize the entire event each time you arrive to it, you may find yourself ‘tricking’ your finger into accomplishing more than you thought possible.

This requires patience, relaxation and focus – yet I am constantly surprised by the results I get from doing just this.

There are countless etudes and studies devoted to trills. Yet none are more enjoyable and satisfying than those found in Kreutzer. In volume 2 of ‘Kreutzer for Violin Mastery’ I take you through all sorts of possibilities – measured, unmeasured, prepared, with terminations and without terminations.

There are some players who believe in practicing trills using various rhythms. I haven’t mentioned this here because I don’t feel they really produce the results I’m after. Kreutzer does.

Though challenging indeed, these Kreutzer etudes can really clean and polish a trill beautifully.

Clayton Haslop is Concertmaster (leader) on hundreds of movie soundtracks, including The Matrix movies, Titanic, Avatar, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Star Trek, Up, Jurassic Park, Apollo- and The Perfect Storm. Haslop creates bestselling Instructional DVD courses used by beginning to professional violinists worldwide.

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