learn to play the violin

I’m four days behind in reporting on this goal. I”ve practiced 2 hours a day since for another 8 hours towards the thousands needed for mastery. I spent most of that time concentrating on getting better tone from my bowing.

On Monday I had an hour jamming with an accomplished young violinist. I was playing the piano, accompanying her to a piece we will be doing in church in a few weeks. But I brought along my violin and asked her to play it. I wanted an analysis on the quality of the instrument’s tone as I just dont’ seem to be making progress and was wondering how much of the problem might be the instrument. She said the problem lies in the bow. There was an immediate and massive difference in the sound coming from my violin when she used her bow versus mine. She also said my violin has a bad metallic tone to it and some rattling from the box. It’s a cheap student rental.

I cannot afford a quality instrument at this point. My friend told me that a quality bow alone would cost me $300 at least. But it was somewhat comforting to me to have the hope held out that I can get an improvement in tone by simply purchasing better equipment. I will continue to work like it’s ALL my problem and practice diligently. Then when I can afford a better instrument and bow, it will be a very nice morale boost to have an immediate inrprovement in tone.

Charity

One hour lesson and one hour practice. Both sessions worked on pentatonic and harmonic scales, Soldier’s Joy, pentatonic runs and fills, slurred bowing and improving tone.

Just put in three more hours for a total of five hours today. Cutting into time I needed for other stuff, but I had a breakthrough on improving tone, which has been my biggest problem to date. And it was just a simple matter of adjusting the angle at which the bow hairs met the strings. But it set off a domino effect of changing the hold and my wrist angle and my bowing style. So had a major relearning session, but it was so worth it. Better resonance. Got rid of the scratchiness. More mellow. I am really pleased with tonight’s work.

More practice…

Two hours more:

scales in various keys
arpeggios
bow drills
one hour rock and metal improvisations to IPOD library selections

Thinking about a new bow. I’ve upgraded to higher quality strings. Still not getting the tone I want. Though it was a huge improvement. Then again…it could be me. :) :)

Two more hours practice. Blues and jazz scales and then an hour of rock improvisations along to recordings.

Another two hours

pretty much the same routine as yesterday with a little more work on some bluegrass stuff

Spent two hours yesterday…

Intonation
Bow control drills
C Scale
D Scale
G scale
A scale
Arpeggios in the same
Worked on Soldier’s Joy (bluegrass tune)
Improvisational Fillers
Played along to randomly shuffled songs on my IPOD

Two more hours to contribute to the 5,000 I’ve been told it takes to master the violin. A drop in the ocean, but bit by bit I’ll get this done. My improvisations are improving. I’m finding that my intonation is not too bad with the removal of my cheater tapes. It’s more ingrained that I had thought.

I removed my beginner’s “fret tapes” from my violin today. I guess I”m going to find out just how much I’ve learned about intonation…

Charity

I’ve been playing for about 7 months now. I don’t think I’m as far along as I should be at all. Especially when it comes to technical skills. Particularly when I consider that I am picking up the violin after already being fairly established musically (piano, song-writing and vocals). It is much harder than I thought and I am not at all happy with my progress as far as quality of sound, bow control and bowing technique. Intonation isn’t bad. My vocalists background probably helps me there in discerning pitch. I am discouraged. Practicing but not showing much improvement. Not really sure where to go from here… Guess I just keep plodding along and hope for a breakthrough. I could up the amount of practice time in.