Hello, my name is Justin Canter. I am a Classical Cellist in New York City and I am going to talk a little bit about left hand positioning on the Cello. So when I play with the left hand on the Cello, I make a C for Cello sort of the shape, violin is kind of played like this, let me show you.
I get my hand so my fingers are perpendicular against the string, my thumb is touching lightly between the second and touching lightly in the back of the neck which ends of being between the second and third finger of these two. When I pull in you can see I make a straight line between this knuckles basically all the way to my elbow so it is something like this and like this. And what I am doing is actually sort of hooking the string with my finger and so with this side of the string and when I pull in it feels sort of like I am pulling a sliding glass door with that motion.
I have my fingers well spaced so they match the pitches on the Cello that we need and I have my thumb behind two and three and then I pull in able to get a sound. So I calibrate my hand.
(Demo)
To make sure that I am in tune and then I go.
(Demo)
You can see how this part of the hand is relatively stationary.
(Demo)
Now, when I play it vibrato which is isolation of the sound.
(Demo)
My hand position is very different, I am still pulling towards myself but now I am making sure that my hand weight is all over the finger that I am playing.
(Demo)
So you can see there is a lot more motion. When I play vibrato, what I do is take the weight of my palm in my hand and they put it over the finger that I am playing. It gives me a lot more control and gives me the evenness that I need in the vibrato. When I am playing quickly, I want to keep the weight of my hand centered so when I am pulling in, all I have to do move my fingers, nothing else movers. It makes everything less complicated. Those are basically two different hand shapes that we use to play the Cello.
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