ELCBK said
@Gordon Shumway -

Can you tell us a few specific things that the Simon Fischer "Basics" book helped you with? 

  

Not really. Mainly it corroborates what my teacher says. For instance she says I must intonate using my fingers, not my hand (e.g. I tend to use hand vibrato to initiate an intonation correction) - otherwise you come out of position - and Fischer says the same thing when he has "square" and "extended" finger shapes. Or in the "knitting" in Beethoven's Spring Sonata, she is worried about the angle the bow makes on my D string swinging too far from the G string (usually it's the opposite - one plays the G string way too far from the D string). Fischer deals with this in what he says about pivoting. I aim to use Fischer to supplement and speed up what I learn from my teacher, so that we get out of the remedial zone asap.

Couple of things.

Someone (a long time ago) posted a video telling you that parallel bowing is bad.

Someone else (a long time ago) asked how to play louder.

I'm off the bow-per-note Corelli and onto Elgar's Salut d'Amour for the purposes of bow control exercise. So I've been working a lot on parallel bowing this year but also now learning how to play quieter.

There's no point in rejecting parallel bowing if you can't parallel bow in the first place. That video was basically aimed at advanced violinists.

To play quietly you don't rely on the fingerboard. That's mainly for special effects. The temptation there is always to use too little RH index pressure and thus whisper. My teacher wants my pianos and pianissimos to sound MEATY. The way to do that is continue to parallel bow but reduce bow speed, keeping up RH index pressure. Part of the problem is playing a pianissimo that can be heard in the distance. It's too easy to hear one when it's next to your ear, so you feel that anything goes.

Basically a pianissimo needs to be relative to the rest of the music. It can be as loud as you like as long as the audience reaction is "aah!" and not "woah!"

There's a Pablo Casals quote "mezzo-forte ranges from quite loud to really quite quiet, and mezzo-piano ranges from quite quiet to really quite loud"

Check your strings for rosin. If it reaches halfway down the fingerboard, you need to learn how to parallel bow.