Once you have learned vibrato it’s easy breezy, but to learn vibrato is quite difficult. Learning vibrato can be a very long journey.

While doing vibrato exercises like the big sirene (click here for vibrato exercises), it can be difficult to keep your violin or viola in the same position.

There are two things that can cause this problem:

1) You can be moving in the wrong direction. Vibrato only ‘works’ when you move in the direction of the string. Vibrato sound is achieved by lengthening and shorting the string with your finger. By doing this the tone goes up and down a little bit, which sounds like vibrato.

When you move your finger not in the direction of the string, but from left to right or sideways, you will not hear vibrato. Besides that your violin will move from the left to the right too and can slip of your shoulder and fall on the ground.

2) Vibrato must be done in a relaxed way. Violin or viola playing is already difficult enough and you have to do a lot of things at the same time. This multitasking can tense you up.

When your arm and hand are tensed, you can’t do the right vibrato movement. Besides that you can’t play well when you are tensed. Vibrato must be done very lose and mustn’t cost any effort.

Practicing vibrato should start with a big relaxed movement which you make smaller and smaller into a relaxed fluent vibrato. When you skip a couple of essential steps and force your hand to do vibrato right away in a robotic uncontrolled way, you will shake the violin with this rough movement.