Playing faster on the violin: A step-by-step guide

This blog post accompanies Violin Class Podcast Episode 37. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There’s something about being a human being that just makes you want to be able to play things fast.

Like everything in violin, I have no secret sauce to playing fast, but I do have some strategies.

The goal is not just to play fast, but fast and clean. Sometimes, we tend to speed up in fast passages and squish all the notes together— to get it over with.

But if you work methodically, I think speeding things up isn’t the hardest part of violin playing by a long stretch. It just takes a bit of time.

To play it fast, play it slow

The most important place to start when trying to play something fast is to play it very slowly.

My husband and I are doing some renovations in our house right now. I have my Pinterest board ready, and imagine that I jumped the gun and start laying furniture and putting in a cute light fixture right away, before my husband finishes the rennovations. He needs to open up the walls and then patch them up, reroute a few pipes, get dust everywhere, and generally building up the room from the ground up.

If I put my new armchair and pictures on the wall in there before that happens, it will get dusty and sad and wet, and I’ll have two choices— leave them there and sit on a dusty chair, or take them all out, replace them with new ones, and put them all back in. But of course I’m not going to do that, because it’s a waste of time and money— I know that there’s an order to things.

If you jump right into playing things fast, or even at a medium speed, this is exactly what you’re doing. Either you’re going to end up with a jumbled mess of notes and tension, or you’re going to have to undo all the work you’ve done and then redo it properly from a slow tempo anyway.

So when you encounter a bunch of 16th notes in a row, you need to pick them apart one by one.

The Metronome Formula

My formula working with metronome, and I use it daily both in practice and in my lessons:

Put your metronome on to 60 bpm
Each note gets 4 beats, no matter the written rhythm

That’s it.

If your passage is particularly tricky, put it down to 50 bpm— but either way, there’ll be a tempo where you can tackle that section.

Figure it out before you speed it up

When it comes to learning a fast passage, the work is divided into two parts: learning the passage, and then speeding it up. Most of the legwork actually happens in the figuring it out part, which is where you’re working really slowly. Again, once you can play this well and it feels easy, you can start bumping up the tempo.

This sounds simple enough, but it’s so tempting to start going faster when we kinda-sorta have something and it’s not completely solid at that slow tempo.

Metronome Charting

So the most classic, tried and true way of speeding up a passage of music is by using a metronome, and I’m going to walk you through how to do this properly, step-by-step.

I like to practice a twist on this which helps you to solidify the passage, because I find that sometimes I’ll be able to play this at a certain speed and then the next day it won’t be quite as clean as it was previously.

That is through a process called metronome charting, and it is essentially taking 2 steps forward, 1 step back, 2 steps forward, 1 step back.

So let’s say I have my passage. The first step is to figure out my goal tempo, which I can do by listening to my piece and using the tap function of the metronome to get a number.

In case you don’t know what the tap function is, it’s pretty much the handiest tool ever and I use it like 10 times a day. I’m not sure if all apps have it, but my favorite free metronome app does, and essentially you can just tap a button at a certain speed and it will give you the closest bpm. This is super useful because it allows you to work backwards in figuring out tempi.

So in your chart, you’re going to write down your goal tempo. The next step is going to be figuring out where you can play this comfortably. Play through the passage, and wherever you can play it in tune, with great tone, and with it overall feeling easy is the tempo we’re going to write down. This should not feel like a sprint— just like a light job, where you’re able to keep a conversation going as you’re in motion.

It should sound great and you should be able to walk around while you’re playing, no resistance. Then, sing that to yourself at the exact same speed as you use your tap function to figure out your starting tempo.

So now we have a starting point and an ending point.

As an example, let’s say I can play through my passage at 54 bpm, and I need to get it to 160 bpm.

So here’s where the chart comes in. I’m going to go up by intervals of 3 or 4, that’s up to you. I’m going to go with 3.

So after 54, we’re going to go up 2 intervals of 3, so I’ll then write down 57 and 60bpm as my next practice spots. Then, I’ll go down by 30, and revisit 57 bpm. Then, up by 3 and 3 again, and down 3….all the way til 160. As you can imagine, you’re not going to get through this in a day, or a week. It might take a couple months depending on how difficult it is, but it’s going to be rock solid by the time you get there.

To take this one step further, and each practice session, start 6 beats below where you ended the previous session.

The goal is to never feel resistance— each time you go up in tempo shouldn’t be much harder than the previous. And you won’t just play each tempo once- you’re going to use a few other strategies that I’ll cover next. If you start to make mistakes, you’ve gone up too fast— bump it down a few increments.

Push the tempo

So let’s say I’ve been diligently working on this passage for a few weeks, and I’m just about at 160 bpm— great. I’m actually going to push it about that tempo just a bit faster than it needs to be— maybe go up to 166bpm. That way, when I go back down to 160, it feels easier and slow.

If you’re playing something that’s crazy fast, this might not be super possible, but even one or two clicks above will help give you confidence that your goal tempo is solidly in your hands.

Clarity over speed

As I mentioned earlier, playing each note clearly is the key to get a fast passage to sound good. A trick to doing that if things are feeling muddy is to focus on the lift of the finger instead of the drop. This encourages your hand to open instead of close, and it’s crazy how well this works. My teacher used to always say— just lift high! It helps keep your fingers from jumbling together.

The other thing to know is that playing something clean and evenly will actually help it to seem faster than it is.