Whether you’ve been playing violin for 10 minutes or 10 years, you’ve probably realized that being tense is the ultimate enemy to playing the violin. Playing with tension can impact everything, from your tone, to your left hand finger action, to your overall joy of playing. These 6 exercises will help you relax while playing the violin.

But first…set-up!

Having a Comfortable Set-Up

Having a good set-up is essential to staying relaxed. So If you’re not comfortable with your shoulder rest or your chin rest, that’s the first thing you’ll want to investigate. I have several resources on adjusting that shoulder rest and getting more comfortable

Exercise #1

Our first exercise for tension-free playing is to play with your jaw open. It’s very common to hold tension in your jaw. That tension tends to trickle down throughs the neck to the rest of your body. So one way to practice is with your mouth open. Try it and you’ll realize that it’s actually hard to tense up your neck with your jaw open.

Exercise #2

Walk around while you play! It’s very easy for your body to be locked and stiff if you’re stuck in one place. So try walking around your practice room while playing to help you relax. Try it with simple things like open strings or scales. Alternatively you can also try swaying a little bit to help you unlock any tense muscles.

Exercise #3

While practicing and working hard on the violin, we often forget one vital element to our playing: breathing.

Consciously breathing in a certain way can not only help you to relax, it can also help your tone. During your warm-up period while you’re playing open strings, try inhaling on up bows and and exhaling on down bows. You can also try breathing in right before you play and then exhaling and relaxing as you play the first note of a song or scale.

Exercise #4

Try playing something and tense up every muscle you possibly can. While this may seem conutnerintinuitve, often times we tense up muscles without even realizing it. So play super tense for a scale or song, and then follow that up playing “normally.” You might be able to identify specific areas of your body that you didn’t even realize you were tensing up. Your muscles will also enjoy relaxing when you resort to playing normally.

Exercise #5

This exercise is specifically for left hand tension. It’s important to remember that we have opposing hands. Whatever tension is present with the fingers, the thumb will try to oppose and mimic that tension and vice versa. So if you’re pressing the strings with excessive pressure, the thumb will have to oppose that pressure resulting in what I call the “death grip.” Try this exercise to get rid of the death grip on the violin.

Play an easy scale or tetrachord with your fingers barely touching the string. It will sound bad.
Add a little more pressure with the left hand. Imagine that you’re pressing the strings down halfway to the fingerboard. Play it again.
Add just a little more pressure until you can lightly feel the fingerboard underneath your fingers. Play the passage again.

At this point, the passage probably sounds fine and hopefully you’ve noticed that you need a lot less finger pressure to depress the strings properly. Do this exercise anytime you’re experiencing tension or pain in your left hand.

Exercise #6

The last thing you can do to help you to relax is to think about your body and tension awareness when you’re not playing the violin. If you’re tense in other areas of your life, you can’t expect to pick up a violin and have that tension magically disappear. So become more aware of your body. When you’re driving the car, are there some muscles you could relax? When you’re waiting in line are you subconsciously tense somewhere in your body.

Learning to relax your body when you’re not playing the violin will help you relax when you are playing violin. Becoming more aware of subconconscious tension was actually the key for me when it came to getting rid of uncontrollable tension in my playing.

Happy Practicing!