I had a 10 year gap in my violin play and I'm still having trouble remembering the correct fingering (specifically for 4 and more sharps/flats).
Where can I find some fingering charts/schemes available on-line, or do I have to dedicate some to create them for all/most of the scales?
Mel Bay's Chart is pretty good. Violin online dot com has some useful charts too: chromatic for basic positions and diatonic for up to 7th position. It also features nice fingerboard diagram and photos.
The diagram below basically puts Mel Bay's 'movable finger patterns' into a circle of fifths. All the 1's in it mean the tonic of (any) major scale, and it is meant to be read from top to bottom; therefore in the descriptions below, 'next box' usually means 'the box below'.
Going going from any box to the next box means going up a perfect fifth or down a perfect fourth, and going to the previous box means down a perfect fifth or up a perfect fourth or (that's like going between 1st and 3rd or 4th positions). Going to the next-next box goes up a major 2nd (that's like going from the 3rd to the 4th position), and going to the previous-previous box goes down a major 2nd (that's like going from the 3rd to the 2nd position). Going to the box in the same row in the other column means going tritone; therefore, going to other-column-then-next means up a semitone and going to other-column-then-previous means down a semitone. Going to the previous-previous-previous box goes up a minor 3rd and going to the next-next-next-next box goes up a major third (that's like going next-next twice, i.e. up major second twice). As usual, going the other way the same number of times flips the musical interval from ascending to descending or vice versa. Use similar logic to deal with other positions.
Carl Flesch - Scale System – if you can handle it. Just pick what you can out of it, and don't kill yourself in the process!
You could get Barbara Barber's Scales for Advanced Violinists. That's pretty cheap, and has scale and arpeggio patterns for all 12 keys in 3 octaves. I would learn the G, A and Bb scales in one octave, starting with the open G string, the high 1 finger on the G string, which is A, and the low two finger on the G string, which is Bb. In G and A, listen for notes which are either the same notes as the open strings, or octaves of the open strings, or octaves of the 3rds or 5ths of the open strings. That would be G, D, A, E, B, F#. Listen as you play the notes. If you are in tune, the open strings will ring. The fifths will ring, but not so loudly. C# and G# are thirds of the A and E strings, but they don't seem to ring like the thirds of the G and D strings (B and F#) do. You could try the B scale starting on the second finger high, but that has almost no ringing notes, so it's kind of flat sounding, and it's hard to tell how in tune you are playing. Eventually you have to learn to play them without looking, so you might start right away. I know you want to get your money's worth for your violin, and you have paid for all those notes between the piano's notes, but it's still better to play in tune.
Maybe more interesting, but more costly, is Simon Fisher's new scale book. He has scales and arpeggios, but he presents the construction of the scale in a way I've not seen before. I think it may help with intonation.
Fisher's presentation goes like this. You probably already know that the Major scale looks like WWhWWWh, where W is a whole step, and h is a half step. So, CDE-FGAB-C has half steps between E and F, and between B and C. But you can also look at the scale as two tetrachords WWh separated by a whole tone spacer. That is, WWh W WWh. Now, you know that the 7th step (B in the C scale) is the leading tone, so it leans up to the C. But in some sense, then, the 3rd (the E in the C scale) leans up to the 4th, and the 4th and octave play similar roles in the two halves of the scale. If you can hear that, you will have a good start in learning to play the scales in tune.
For an example, if you play a 1st position G scale on the G string, you will see this. The finger positions for A B and C have the same spacing as for D E F# and G. You can start in 1st position on the G, D or A strings, if you are just starting to learn the fingerboard.
Apparently this is the basis of the Flesch scale system, though I haven't read it.
Hope this helps.
