Violin Bow Technique+
for players, students & teachers

Technique, fluency & free expression

We develop fluency through mastering the fundamentals, and in this we find the means to freely express our musical ideas. For everyone interested in playing violin – this website illustrates my approach to learning the techniques at the heart of good playing.

Using the website

Each topic carefully illustrates a particular exercise with a video clip, explanatory text and scores. You can follow the order in which the material is presented, beginning with the basics and moving through to the more advanced techniques, or select a topic of interest and navigate from there. There are many advantages in using video in this way to assist your violin study or teaching:

• Being able to repeatedly view an exercise can reveal the simultaneous physical actions involved in violin playing. Being able to see the interdependence in these actions can provide new perspectives and insights.
• Teachers can use a particular video clip of an exercise to illustrate a reference point in a lesson.
• Students are able to match a topic under study to a video clip and do the preliminary work prior to the lesson with the teacher, making the lesson itself far more efficient.

The menus can move you around the material on the website very quickly. And while there is a lot of content (more than 400 topics with video clips, text and printable scores) keep in mind that learning to play the violin is a subtle art that shouldn’t be rushed. Take your time, view each video repeatedly and absorb the topic fully, returning to it as often as you feel is necessary to extract the lesson.

The material here is available by subscription ($6/month, $36/year or $108/lifetime) and subscribers are able to view all the content. You can subscribe from the registration page.

– Fintan Murphy, 2022