Well, I am a little closer to my goal, but somehow I also feel further away. The further I dive into learning how to play the violin, the more I realize how challenging it truly is! I admit that I may have been a touch over-confident in my earlier assessment of what it would take to learn to play the violin, however that doesn’t mean that I am any less confident about reaching my goal. It just means that it’s going to be more challenging than I thought!  In my last post, I covered some of what I learned about the basics of the violin, like how to keep proper posture and tune the strings. In this post, I describe my experience working through chapters 4, 5, and 6 of “Violinworks” by Ros Stephen (http://violin-works.com), as well as the details of my practice up to this point. Since my first post, I’ve been able to put my theoretical knowledge to the test by finally picking up the bow and trying my best to produce a good clean sound. What I’ve learned is that holding the bow properly, keeping proper angles and alignment with the strings, and remaining relaxed are all very difficult to do, especially when focusing on all of them at once. I am able to run the bow along a string smoothly if I am to focus solely on my contact point, but as I begin to shift my focus to the placement of my left hand on the neck, I notice my bowing form suffers. I suppose that practicing each of these skills individually is important as a beginner, and as the muscle memory starts to take shape, things will sound better. However, this requires patience and discipline to practice rudiments skills rather than attempting to play more exciting pieces of music, something a fairly intermediate guitar player like myself doesn’t like to do.

My music reading, on the other hand, has improved greatly! The repetition of reading from my instruction book, practicing in class and teaching drum lessons on the weekend has got me more confident than I’ve ever been. I’ve got a strong base, and now I am ready to read more into the different notes and strings specific to violin sheet music.

I still have not looked at the sheet music for “He’s a pirate”, but I have been practicing two songs by ear. Working these out has been fun, and definitely helped with learning the spatial awareness of the notes on the neck. The first is twinkle twinkle little star, which sounds good when played fast or slow, and incorporates playing on multiple strings. The second, I was inspired to learn because I love the song and because the violin solo in the introduction was fairly easy to sound out. With that, it is safe to say that my roommates are extremely tired of hearing my scratchy, barely recognizable rendition of ‘Come on Eileen’ by Dexy’s midnight runners, but I certainly am not! This song uses all of the strings and incorporates long and short strokes which makes it very fun to play. I have sounded it out in a different key than the original, but it still sounds proper. I will play what I can of this song as well as twinkle twinkle in my video to show my progress.

In chapters 7-13 of my instruction book, the focus shifts from bowing to using the left hand, and to how to properly utilize each individual finger. I’m going to try to progress a little bit faster than I have so far in the semester by working through the book a little bit quicker. I hope to have read to Chater 10 by next week. Wish me luck!

Thanks for reading!