I'm attempting to (re)learn some violin music using the composer's desired fingering. However, my background is not in violin but in fiddle, where fingerings and positions/shifts are rarely written (or required; fiddle style traditionally rarely uses (and music rarely requires) anything but 1st position).
I am having trouble because, while some violin fingerings imply positions on particular strings, the notation is fairly sparse. In many cases, it is underdetermined: a fingering on one string could alternately be the same fingering on the next string down.
I'm looking for feedback on whether I'm doing this correctly, or rules I may not have learned to help make sense of it.
As an extended example of what I'm dealing with, here are the first two lines of a song. There are no positions or strings notated in the music, just a few fingerings here and there:
My current thought process goes something like:
The first note is an A3 which, neglecting unlikely subharmonics, can only be played on the G-string.
The A4 that begins measure 6 is notated "2". I guess that means second finger, 4th position on the D-string? I suppose it could also be 7th position on the G-string, but that seems less-likely since the next note is an open D (I think; since this is not on a note that can't be played on an open string) and also that's pretty high. I guess also the 2nd-finger harmonic on the G-string from 4th position would also achieve D4.
Continuing on, the F4 also has a "2", which can't be played from 4th position, so we could shift back to 1st position, which makes sense since we need to hit the A3 again on the G-string right afterward. I guess this puts the shift in the middle of a slurred passage, but putting it two quavers earlier involves either unnecessary string crossing or a fourth-finger reach, which would be bizarre since we were starting in a position where that isn't necessary.
In measure 7, the G4 also has a "2". So is there supposed to be a shift from 1st position to 2nd position between the F4 and the G4? I suppose it should actually be at the beginning of the measure since the passage is slurred? Though, if we're already shifting, we could shift to the G-string and avoid a string crossing mid-passage.
Though, does a shift make sense? You could already hit the A4 with your 4th finger. Albeit (if the shift is to 2nd position) this explains how the "4" in measure 8 can be hit (with a 4th-finger reach).
And so on. As you can see, I'm having to make all kinds of guesses and assumptions, working from very limited information—and I think I'm doing a bad and inaccurate job of it.
I'm not particularly concerned with this particular piece; what I'm looking for is how to solve these sorts of problems in-general. All these implied shifts on implied strings—isn't there a better way? Some rules I'm missing?