Violin Techniques: Left Hand Pizzicato

Video Transcript

"So there are many types of tricks and little things you can do with your violin when you're playing, lots of cool little things that you're going to learn as you get more and more advanced, but one thing that Galamian really liked to point out a lot was the idea of using left hand pizzicato. So just like in normal pizzicato you have your right, normally it's your right hand that comes around and plucks the string. In left hand pizzicato your left fingers are doing that for you. So he believed that when you were playing this pizzicato that you really wanted to use the pad of your finger. You don't want to be using your fingernail because it's not going to get a nice sound, but really using your finger pad, and if you practice it enough you will find that you can actually get as nice of a left hand pizzicato as well as a regular right hand pizzicato."