It’s no secret to those who know me that I took up playing the violin late in life.
I was about to turn forty and feeling this deep void in my life with regards to making music. It was palpable. I would go to concerts and wish I would have learned an instrument, or stuck with the one I briefly played in grade school. I would see my kid going to her piano lessons and feel a pang of jealousy for her privilege that we were able to give her this opportunity to learn. So I bought a violin and signed up for lessons.
Ten years later I am pretty okay at the violin.
I play in a community orchestra, though, and I am surrounded by dozens of other musicians of varying ability, many of whom learned to play when they were younger. I can’t help but compare. And here’s the rub: sitting among a dozen other violinists each week at rehearsal has highlighted something to me. I call it the vibrato problem.
Vibrato is an important aspect of playing the violin. The finger presses down on the string to shorten the length so that the resultant note can be played. But watch a violinist and you will see that they don’t hold that finger steady: they wiggle it, subtly altering that string length like a sine wave as they are playing the note producing a gentle warbling of the tone. This is vibrato.
Vibrato is still something I struggle with after ten years of playing the violin. My fifty year-old fingers never learned early and are fighting to this day to learn it still. Having a young plastic brain would probably soak this up and it would become second nature, but being an older learner has left me to consciously think about it for every note when there is already a dozen other things to think about while playing.
Extrapolate this to any other art form, any other skill. There is always a vibrato problem for older learners: and I’d like to believe that recognizing it is the first step in knowing how to overcome it.