What are some good exercise for hand vibrato?

Question:

What are some good exercise for hand vibrato?

I'm having a bit of trouble for hand vibrato, on the violin. Does anybody know any good and effective exercise to perfect it?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I'm not a violinist, but a cellist.

I found a couple things helped me with vibrato.

1. Soak you left hand in warm water. This helped me to loosen up my joints and wrist.

2. This one is especially useful for violinists (as my friends in my quartet tell me). They used a small ball, and placed it between their strings. They rolled their wrist with the ball back and forth.

3. I have a bad habit (and my friends still ask my about it) of pratciting vibrato when I get bored. I used a thin rolling pin and used it as if it was the neck of my insturment. This gave me plenty of practice with my vibrato. You can get hours of pratice and muscle memory without even knowing it.

4. Concertrate on relaxing your grip on the neck. Often times, a major problem is that people are simply grabbing the neck, which dramatically decreases virbrato ability.

5. As other people have said, use a metronome. Start on you E string, as it takes the least amount of effort to work with. Start slow, then work your speed up until you are satisfied. Then, move on to you A string, and repeat. Eventually, when you get done with the G string, you will notice that the E string is extremely easy.

6. A method that I have heard of, but never used, is sliding back and forth on the neck. Start with bigger slides, and eventually work it smaller and smaller until you are not sliding, but vibrating.

Best of luck! Vibrato is a hard thing to learn, and harder to perfect, but once you learn it, it is an absolute gift.