Categories
Practicing the Violin Staying Motivated to Practice Transformation through the Violin

10X Practice – Making Your Violin Practice Time Pay Off Big Time

10X Violin Practice

Stop fretting or whining about how difficult that song or passage is.

Instead, start by finding or creating ten distinctly different ways to improve it. Even the smallest improvement counts. Do that, and not only have you improved your song, you’ve also gained ten new problem solving skills which can be applied to future musical challenges. Your violin practice time was a high payoff activity that will save countless hours of work moving forward.

When all is said and done you are:
1. A more skilled and thus more desirable musician
2. A more effective human being who has trained her brain to do high quality, creative work in any situation.

Music is transformative. Violin is transformative.

 

Categories
Practicing the Violin Transformation through the Violin

Why study a musical instrument?

study of the violin is transformational

How a violin practice transforms your life.

1. Learning how to truly master specific skills leads to a fulfilled life.
2. Motions and actions are how you shape your basic approach to the instrument. Using simplicity, ease and mastery moves you through life gracefully.
3. Practice is defining specific goals. Defining. Specific. Constant clarity.
4. Practice strategies are the pathway to your mastery. Thus choosing work that matters and doing that work mindfully, will produce a high quality result.
5. Performing is creating work that is important to other people. Like sales and marketing hinges on understanding others interests, problems and aspirations.
6. Performing is also facing up to your challenges. Life presents us with such challenges on a regular basis.
7. Choosing the violin (or any instrument) teaches you to define and implement large projects.

The violin or any instrument becomes transformational when (and only when) you approach it from this larger perspective.

If you’re in it just to learn a couple of songs, that’s OK too. Just don’t expect any more than a quick diversion.

Categories
Practical Violin Video Exercises and Tips Violin Vibrato

Violin Vibrato, a Canary in the Orchestra Pit


I’m watching your playing. Maybe at a gig, in orchestra and of course during your violin lesson. It’s like x-ray vision, though not in a creepy sort of way. Call it an occupational hazard of being a long time violin teacher.

I don’t have to hear you play. A very few visual cues will tell me whether you approach the violin with ease and mastery. Or if you are engaging in battles (or just skirmishes) with your instrument.

Perhaps the biggest canary in my coal mine is your left hand, and how you use it to produce vibrato. Because a great violin vibrato is the natural result of good basic playing habits.

For my fellow vibrato nerds:

There are only a very few simple motions needed to produce vibrato, I describe them in obsessive detail in this video.

Categories
Practice Problems Practicing the Violin

How to Cut Your Practice Time in Half

invincible-violinist-oasis

Here’s a simple music practice shortcut for your consideration. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. And I can promise that you’ll achieve your current results and still cut your practice time in half. Or easily get twice as much done in the same amount of time.

It’s simply this: protect your practice as a sacred oasis from day to day life. It’s a place filled with curiosity, experimentation, discovery and a wonderful spacious feeling. In this place, impatience and frustration simply melts away. In this place the quality of your practice always exceeds expectations because any agenda exists only for the sheer joy of the work itself. It is truly immediate success on a new level.

On the other hand, you can continue to push and drive forward by force. Practice when over scheduled, exhausted or compelled. Accept gigs and auditions that cement unrealistic expectations into your life. We all know how that goes.

Categories
Practicing the Violin

How hard is it to play the violin?

how hard is it to play the violin?
how hard is it to play the violin?

I don’t mean: “is it complicated?”

What I really want to know is, “how much PHYSICAL EFFORT is needed to play?”
I mean, how hard can it be?
A five year old can do it? A THREE year old can do it.

Still, we all squeeze, push and force sound from our instruments.

When we really need to COAX the music out.
Allow it to flow.

It will.

Allow it to ring through the room, filling us all with its glow.
That part can’t fail, if we’ll only just let it succeed.

It’s not effort that is needed.
The universe is on your side when you choose the violin.