Violin: the Melody's Chord Reference

The chord reference for this instrument. Pick a root, then any of 54 qualities, and get the grips plus the thing a diagram never carries: which section is holding the chord and what it owes the others while it does.

In the melody section this instrument is the melody section's written line — several players bowing one part together, so intonation is a group problem before it is anybody's solo. A chord on a bowed neck is really a choice of double stops drawn from these tones, plus the arpeggio a bow can walk through the rest — and a section playing in unison has to agree on which one, because two answers at once is a chord nobody wrote.

The diagrams mark stopping points on the G–D–A–E fingerboard, and nothing on this neck marks them for you. Each dot is a place a finger has to find by ear, and the playback is there to check that it did — which in section work is a group problem, since several players have to find the same one.