Some things about playing the violin are difficult, complicated, and take quite a while to master. Other aspects of playing are the opposite.
Being ready to begin a performance, for example, is straightforward, simple, and easy to learn: get the finger ready, get the bow ready, then play. “Finger, Bow, Go!” is like “On your mark! Get set! Go!” It has to happen in that order.
I’m always saddened when I encounter a student who lacks knowledge of this essential sequence, because if the first note is shaky, things can often be dicey from there. What might have otherwise been a solid performance is not, because it didn’t get off on the right foot. Even worse, a student who might actually have a lot of potential, in general, might decide that she “isn’t very good,” because she has never experienced herself playing with security.
In what was an all too typical institute master class, I once told a student “Get ready to play the first phrase, but don’t play it.” He looked at me, rolled his eyes, sighed, and said “I’m ready.” But he hadn’t actually done anything to get ready. His bow was wobbling a few inches above no string in particular, and all of his fingers were above the fingerboard. The piece did not begin on an open string.
So, I asked, “How do you know you’re ready?” With his eyes wide open and his mouth ajar, he shook his head, lifted his shoulders, and let out an exasperated “Because I am?” He seemed irritated by what he thought was a ridiculous question.
Before we write him off as a petulant pre-teen, let’s keep in mind that two important things might have been at play: 1) he really didn’t have a concrete definition of “ready” and 2) he might have been thinking “Well, I’m not doing anything else!” In a sense, he and I might have been speaking two different languages. We worked it out.
I’m happy to say that once he could go through the finger-bow-go sequence before starting his piece, his playing was much more solid. No surprise there. What was disappointing for me—and for him, too, I think—was that he found the work tedious and intrusive when he would rather have just played his Book Four piece and had everything go smoothly. It was tedious because the instrument is unforgiving and requires attention to detail. What was intrusive was that I was damaging his wish to be able to play by magic. He wasn’t able to play the piece securely because of other gaps in his musical education. He couldn’t remember the last time he had heard the recording, and he assured me that he never practiced. Getting Ready, then, was a good start, but it wasn’t a cure-all. Surprisingly, on the last day of the institute, he told me that he liked coming to the institute and that he thought my masterclass, in particular, was “fun.”
Early in my teaching career, I read that the legendary violin teacher Dorothy DeLay once noted, “Nothing happens by accident if it is to continue to happen.” In other words, we practice to get closer to guaranteeing specific results rather than just relying on luck, hope, and prayer. After reading DeLay’s comment, I decided to weave her idea into the way I approached teaching my students. “Being ready,” then, is something that can—and must—be taught.
Advancing the Concept
“Finger-Bow-Go!” is a good start, but there are richer levels that can be added to it, depending on the level of the student. One of those levels is “The Numbers” and most teachers I know of have some version of it.
With my beginning students, either a parent or I place the bow and the violin every time the child plays. When the student develops to the point of being ready to handle these details alone, I teach my version of “The Numbers:”
(prequel: “Standing in rest position, get your bow hand ready upside down”—i.e. the bow is parallel to the floor with the bow hairs toward the ceiling and the tip of the bow farthest away from the student.)

put your feet in play position.
put your thumb on the back of the violin and your fingers on top of the strings (roughly fourth position)
reach your violin out (What Paul Rolland called the “Statue of Liberty.”)
turn the violin over (i.e., strings toward the sky)
put the button on your throat
gently swing your nose back and forth; then drop your nose to get your jaw in the jaw rest
put the bow on the string

That may seem like a lot, but if we narrate the sequence enough times—meaning several weeks—students can catch on easily. These become like the steps I imagine a pilot goes through before the plane takes off.
At some point, I’ll want to mention that every violinist has to make two decisions when they “put the bow on the string.” They have to choose a bow spot and a string spot. The placement of the bow should not be an accident or left to chance. And you’ll be doing everyone a favor—especially the student—if you make it crystal clear that “put the bow on the string” means that the bow goes on the string not all wobbly, but the way one might place a mug on a table.
When students are mid to late Book One, I teach them what I have come to call The Get Ready Routine. This is the routine that all of my students use when performing solos. I started teaching it after I saw a video of several of Ronda Cole’s students playing solid performances at various levels of repertoire. Since they all seemed to have a plan for starting, I asked Ronda what it was. What she told me became the basis of The Get Ready Routine. I mention this conversation because, all these decades later, I’m not sure I’m doing exactly what she told me, but I want to give her credit at least for the concept and inspiration. Here are the basic steps I now use:

Stand in rest position and sing the first phrase of the piece inside your head the speed you want it to come out.
Take a big breath
Let it out
Go through the numbers
Breathe in (“through the scroll, as if it were your nostrils”) and start playing

Group classes are a useful place to teach and practice The Get Ready Routine. One student stands on stage and the other students in the class give instructions to that student. I prepare for class by writing the instructions on index cards—“Stand in rest position and sing the first phrase of the piece inside your head the speed you want it to come out.” The steps could be spread out over many cards, to involve the maximum number of students. For example, that first instruction could be spread out over at least three cards: 1. Stand in rest position, 2. Sing the first phrase of the piece inside your head, 3. the speed you want it to come out. In the course of the class, we rotate through all the students, so every student gets experience walking on stage and starting their solo; and every student reads every step of The Get Ready Routine out loud.
It’s worth appreciating that the piano introductions that are so common in Suzuki programs are very similar to the first step, “Sing the first phrase of the piece inside your head, the speed you want it to come out.” They are helpful preparation for what I describe as “Thinking about the piece with your musical mind before playing.” “Musical thinking,” for me, means “singing on the inside,” or what Edwin Gordon would call audiation.
This musical thinking can be an added step to the basic “Finger, Bow, Go!” formula. I insert it just before “Go”, so the enhanced full sequence is “Finger, Bow, Get-your-musical-mind-ready, Go!” In addition to singing inside, “Get-your-musical-mind-ready” can include feeling the pulse. For a more advanced student, determining the musical pulse can happen not by singing the first phrase of the piece inside, but by singing the fastest notes of the piece inside. When reading music, “Get-your-musical-mind-ready” can mean “Give yourself a measure for free.” When playing with a metronome, it can mean “Listen to the clicks” or “Feel the clicks” and/or “Give yourself a measure for free.”
I began this article on a quest to take the guessing out of starting a performance, but I’m going to finish it by saying that, ultimately, there’s a time and place for telling students the truth: a violinist doesn’t really know how the first note will sound until moving the bow. It’s all a guess. You make your best guess with the violin finger, you make your best guess with the bow, and then you go.
A few factors elevate the guessing game. We can tap the finger on the fingerboard to get a sense of whether or not we’re in tune. We can take a moment with the bow to sense whether the amount of weight we’ve got on the bow is too much, too little, or just right. In fact, I sometimes have students get ready to play, then say “Don’t play, but make the bow have too much weight; now too little; now too much; now what you think is just right…now go.” All of these are ways to help the student plug the bow into the string before starting.
Some pieces are off the string. While it is often helpful to start the first stroke on the string, some benefit from starting off the string. In such cases, I teach a concept I learned from Ronda Cole, what she calls an “air set.” There is still bow placement involved, you just place the bow, as Ronda says, “On a glass shelf above the string.”
I also tell students that over the course of time, our guesses get better and better, making it feel less and less like guessing. One might say that we develop an intuitive sense of whether we will like the sound when we move the bow. But that intuitive sense is not something we are born with. It develops with time and attention. It’s not uncommon for people to feel that if they have to do this work, they are less talented, less special, less qualified. This work doesn’t require intense concentration or physical exertion; its challenge comes from these difficult feelings that it can generate. We can give our students the ingredients they need in order to do this work. Our clarity with the sequence helps tremendously. Managing the feelings that come with this work is a topic for another occasion.