Take lessons Max… Incidently, I am the great one ;)...

At least for a year or so, lessons are important to taming this beast. I’ve been playing for 2 years now, and both take lessons and teach myself.

Email me at zeagle79@yahoo.com for
online reccomendations and so forth. al

Hi Max
It is essential to have lessons for violin. The stance is unnatural and you can actually do yourself physical damage if you don’t have it right And the way you hold the bow and the instrument are so important, if you don’t get it right you will develop bad habits that are very difficult to undo.

Once your teacher has got you on the right road then you can do loads of practise on your own.

And if we are arguing about who is the great one I suggest it’s this guy co-incidentally another Max!

i started when i was young so i had lessons. i would recommend lessons because learning on your own would be difficult(not impossible) and you wouldn’t be able to fix habits later down the line for proper technique.

to do some homework on learning on your own i would recommend getting familiar with reading sheet music, getting familiar with scales and the such. that will help you a lot!

thank you all. i will definately look into lessons again. they must be avaiable around me somewhere.

I would say you definately need lessons for when you first start out with the violin. Once you can play a bit, it is fine just to practice regularly but you need lessons to get started.

Yep, lessons are the way to go.

I’ve played violin since I was seven, taking lessons in the Suzuki method, and I definitely couldn’t see myself where I am now without lessons. However, once I was stabalized in technique I did take a couple years off from lessons due to tendonitis, but this was after almost ten years of lessons.

I would definitely encourage you to take lessons, as it is essential to learning proper posture/technique, but if cost is an issue or you’re just giving it a try before you go, I highly recommend www.violinmasterclass.com. It has lots of tutorial videos from holding the violin to advanced techniques such as spiccato and shifting. This has helped me tremendously even while taking lessons.

TAKE LESSONS!!!!