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.