Violin lesson #60

Practice this week was fairly good. I can't complain :)

My lesson this week was not so good. I am playing new pieces and trying to speed up an old piece. Yes, technically the first half and second half of Raggle Taggle Hippie are the same piece but I am learning them as two separate pieces. They will come together when they are both ready. New pieces take some time to learn and it is a slow process. Naturally they don't sound as good at the start as they do at the end. I feel like I am still a "confidence" player. If I start well I will continue well but if I miss a few notes my confidence drops and it takes it a little while to come back. At times like this I need to be kind to myself and keep going. I know that I can get there in the end.

Laura is holding on to the Klezmer book for another week. The last thing I need is the book sitting there, looking at me, tempting me with new and different music, whispering to me, "come and play me Szechuan". There will be time for Klezmer later.

This week I will slow down a little to make sure I get the notes and intonation right, then I can add things like bowing and a little more speed and dynamics.

Laura's violin was still out of action but she did have a loan instrument from Smiths violins. This company comes highly recommended. When the day comes when I might want or need another violin I will be sure to pay them a visit.

Sirisha's lesson started with a crash course in tuning. She is going to India soon and she has been told there is a violin there she can bring home, so understandably she is very excited. Now, chances are very good that the violin is not in tune, so Laura showed her, and I, how to go about it. It was interesting to watch and something I will want to try eventually.

My next few lessons will be on my own. I look forward to Sirisha coming back and seeing the violin she brings home.

Violin lesson #59

This week I had some good practice time. I found I can practice in the playroom with the door closed and not disturb the rest of the family... much =)

And I am happy to say it paid off. Plesiosaurus was close to passing last week and made it this week. I even got to hear Laura's accompaniment on the piano. Unfortunately there is no recording this week.

After this good start I played Raggle Taggle Hippie. It has improved since last week, with a lighter grip on the bow. Now Laura tells me I have to play it faster. Much faster. Not as fast as Old Fiddler Man, but way faster than I am playing it now. Laura's advice is to speed up each phrase separately before playing the whole piece quickly. Did I say whole piece? Scratch that. I only know half of it. Laura wants me to start on the second half this week. It's not technically any harder than the first half, so I imagine it won't take as long again to learn.

At this point I asked Laura a question that has been bugging me for a little while now. I can't play the left-hand fingering for this music unless I am playing the violin. I can't name the notes that I am playing as I play them. I find it very hard to play a phrase from any point except the beginning. Is this a good sign or a bad sign? Apparently it's not a bad sign. As I understand things, it is not necessary to be able to recognise each note individually. it is more important to follow the contour of the music and pay attention to how the notes relate to each other rather than their absolute position on the staff. This will help with sight-reading too. Once I have a starting note I can get the rest of the notes relative to that one. Quite often too Laura will write fingering numbers and bowing directions on the music. Again it is not on every note, but only now and then, or when there is a tricky section. After talking about this I felt a lot better.

I also read some articles about intonation. One man in particular was upset that some violin teachers don't teach this "properly". Let me just say that I often know when I play a wrong note, and I know how to change my finger position (higher or lower) to make that note sharper or flatter. Laura helps me with this too, so I am happy that I am learning to play in tune, and more importantly, I am learning how to fix my own mistakes. I have found one of the best exercises for this is to play scales. Yes, perhaps it is boring, but they are great for helping to play in tune. There is no thought about what's next. It's a scale. You know what's next. That way you can focus on the sound you are making. If it's the wrong sound, you can fix it.

Then it was time to select a new tune. Laura's violin was broken so she had to demonstrate with Patience. I love the sounds Laura can coax from my violin, more so because I know that with practice and patience I will get those sounds myself. There was no Bach or Mendelssohn (I get the feeling I won't be able to say I was "classically trained") but there were some lovely Scottish or Irish tunes and a Russian tune that sounded way too happy to really be Russian. Don't kill me. I know there are some wonderfully happy pieces of Russian music of course. I figure I can learn them all eventually so settled for the first sheet which has Hornpipe (from Little Suite no. 3) by Peter Martin and Fiddler's Fancy by Sheila Nelson. They don't look like they are too hard to learn and will certainly be fun to play.

That's it for this week. Sirisha had an early lesson this week so I was on my own. Next week she will be back for what has become a regular double lesson before she goes on holiday.

Violin Lesson #58

This week was a shocker for practice. I think I managed to play just twice, and the Friday was because I snuck to the park near home between leaving work and actually getting home to go to dinner at my parents place. No, I'm not happy I had to sneak, yet had I not done so I will have practiced even less.

Laura forgot it was Valentines Day this Friday. She said she might have taught as something romantic, then she played a little of It's Now Or Never. How sweet =)

Still, it must have done some good because... I passed First Base. There is an audio recording of it and I will link it to this blog and perhaps post the link for the blog to FaceBook. Laura accompanied me on piano and Sarisha was the sound engineer (she pressed record on the voice recorder app on my phone). It was a very good performance but I will stick with it one more week to give it some polish. The criticism was that the lyrical pieces were not as musical as they might have been. I am sure I have played them musically during practice. It might have been a combination of (a) playing the piece with the Laura on the piano for the first time and (b) recording the result.

The other three songs are showing improvement too. If I can get some decent practice in I should be able to finish another piece or two. The one with the most work to do is still Raggle Taggle Hippie. There is still quite a distance between how the music sounds to me now and how I want it to sound. I can play the notes in the right order and in tune, but there is something not quite right. I have been advised to relax my hold on the bow and let the bow float across the strings. Perhaps I am over-thinking it and not feeling the music enough. It's hard to put my finger on it exactly but I know it when I hear it.

Sarisha started on third position today. We don't go from first to second. Second is actually last. Third is taught second. I don't think I am too far behind. It is more motivation to make the most of my practice to improve to the point where I can learn more technique.

I only have the three pieces this week. Hopefully next week I might have a Klezmer piece, or I might suggest a Greek song, or perhaps Jar Of Hearts. Maybe I can even play it like this guy.

Extra note

Tonight I took my wife to Beaudesert because she had a training session. While she was training I went to the local fish and chip shop for dinner. When I got back she was still training so I parked at the centre. I discovered two things: One, playing violin in the dark is really hard. Lighting was poor so I had to find my positions by ear. My intonation suffered and so did my bowing. Two, I don't know a whole lot of songs to play. I really do need to learn some more songs and review them from time to time. Laura has taught me several, obviously, and I have taught myself some too. It will be all for nothing if I can't remember them to play. Still, it was an experience and I enjoyed it.

Violin Lesson #57

Another week, another lesson.

I brought the klezmer how-to book that I picked up at the London Klezmer Quartet show last week. Laura liked it and started playing some of the tunes from it. Despite the fact that the easier parts are to the front of the book and the harder parts to the back, Laura found a song that she thought I could play somewhere in the middle. Okay, not the whole song, but the first part ... for now. I am currently playing four pieces so I'm even more keen now to finish them.

Also, I must remember to ask how far away, roughly, is "Jar Of Hearts", which was in a women of pop book I bought a while ago. There might be easier songs in that book, but I'm really looking forward to playing that one.

There was, again, less practice this week than I would have liked, but some weeks are like that. I just hope there aren't too many. I was able to play three pieces today: First Base, Plesiosaurus and Hear That Whistle. They are all getting very close to being finished. A lot of the instruction now is for fine-tuning the pieces, and to me that's very important. Whether I end up just playing for myself, or one day playing for others, I don't want the playing to be mediocre. That's not why I'm learning.

A few things that stood out today were my left thumb needs to be far more relaxed and lower on the next of the violin. If I can't get a good first position thumb everything else will be difficult so I will really be concentrating on that this week. Also, I need to have "McDonalds" fingers for the harmonics - that is to say, they have to be arched, not stretched. No, I'm not going to forget that any time soon =)

I have kept it short this week because it is very similar to last week. I know what I have to do to improve. Here's hoping I get a little more practice time this week.

Sarisha and I shared lessons again this week. Sarisha had scales and exercises (which I hope to be getting soon) and then her Indian piece "Paruvam Vanaga" from the movie Roja. There is a lot to this arrangement and it sounds so cool. The beginning few bars of the arrangement remind me of the Star Wars theme. It also has some technical elements I have not yet learned, but will learn eventually