Learning violin/viola

I'm going to start learning violin (or maybe viola)soon and being a beginner, I'm going to buy a reasonably inexpensive violin, but violinists: is there anything I should look out for to make sure I'm getting something decent for it's price, like intonation or something?

On the same note, what would you guys recommend to be the best way to learn the violin, to someone (me) who is already an advanced musician. So in other words, what is the quickest and most satisfying way to learn the technique of playing the violin?

Any methods/books?

Yeah that too, are there any beginner books that don't actually go deep into the "this is known as a note. This note is called C" stuff??

how about a teacher?

I wouldn't suggest trying to learn an instrument via a book.

I learned the bassoon and oboe after playing piano for 15 years. After a few "getting to know you" lessons, it was a breeze for the teachers to know what direction and speed to go at after that. They were able to concentrate on teaching technique rather than musical fundamentals.

The danger with trying to learn an instrument on your own is the very great potential for physical injury. Particularly from a string instrument where posture and hand position CAN lead to serious tendon problems.

I second what Michel says about posture, the same applies to guitar, practising in a bad posture can give you some serious problems, I once had to stop playing for a few months, if I'd carried on playing the way I did I could've easily done myself some permanent injury. Try and find yourself a teacher, at least to show you the basics so you don't cause yourself any damage.

Yeah, I am meaning to get a teacher too, I just haven't found one in my area yet

You absolutely have to get a teacher. Especially for violin or viola. It's not one of the easiest instruments to learn on your own.

As for the instrument, you should pick the one that sounds best to you. I once had to decide between two violins, I wanted to pick that one, then my violin teacher made me look at the wall and played both of them and made me choose one. The one I chose then was the one I wouldn't have chosen otherwise.

And remember to practice a lot. These instruments require a lot of practice to master.

PLAY THE VIOLA!! (I do =D) Get a teacher, and use EE (Essential Elements) Books 1,2 & 3.....Take off from there.

When I learned to play violin I didn't start with my own violin at all; my parents rented one incase it was just a phase. When I got better I got my own. I started with a book called strictly strings but if you are an advanced musician I wouldn't advise it since a lot of the first part of the book is devoted to learning to read music. The tunes in it are ok I suppose but I found better ones outside it. Oh and everything everyone else says about posture is absolutely right. You'll need a teacher for that.

I could write a book on self-learning the violin from scratch, especially for a person on a very low budget.

I actually started out by buying several very inexpensive violins, instead of one good one. Why would I do such a thing? Simple. I wanted to experiment with tweaking violins and if I only had one expensive one I’d be a afraid to touch it. With cheap violins I could experiment with them, and always have one read to play and practice with at the same time.

I actually have 5 violins now. Four of them were bought for under $100 with case and bow. One was as low as $50 (but it really did turn out to be junk in the end). The wood in the peg box was too soft to maintain the string tension of steel (or even synthetic strings), the pegs simply wouldn’t hold the tension. I salvaged it though by using gut strings on it and now my broke violin has become my “Baroque” Violin. It stays in tune will with the gut strings and actually sounds pretty good with them.

In any case, the other 3 inexpensive violins turned out to be quite nice in the end. I also purchased a used violin that had been recently purchased new for $500 by a musician who wanted to move up to a better instrument. Ironically this $500 violin is NOT my best violin. In fact my best violin now actually turns out to be the very first one I bought for $80 with case and bow. Although They’ve gone up in price since then.

My $80 wonder is a Kennedy violin you can see it here.

Kennedy Violins

You won’t buy a better violin at this price anywhere. Plus, these people will take care of you. For example if there is a problem like the bow is warped or whatever, they will accept a return and make it right. Where are you going to find that kind of customer service for $80?

However, you’re not really getting off this cheap because you aren’t done yet. When you get the Kennedy the first thing you want to do is get some decent strings for it. I recommend Pirastro Evah strings. These strings retail for something like $99. (more than the violin cost!). However, you can buy them on the web at most places for closer to $50. And I’ll tell you a secret. If send an email to Pirastro customer service and tell them that you heard they will send a fee set of Pirastro Evah’s for evaluation they will send you a free set! Just include your mailing address, the size of your violin (i.e. 4/4), and weather you want a ball-end or loop-end E-string (I recommend the loop-end).

PIRASTRO Strings

The next thing you want to do is toss out the chin-rest, bridge, and tailpiece. Not that they aren’t usable, but they are a bit heavy. You can but more petite hardware that will allow the instrument to vibrate more freely. There are many places on the web that you can purchase a tailpiece, chinrest, and peg set. You don’t really need the pegs but these sets sell reasonable (like under $25) all the parts are made of real wood. I bought a nice rosewood set from a shop on eBay, and installed everything myself including fitting the pegs, but I had to buy a peg shaver for that which is beyond the scope of what you’d probably want to do.

Now take the violin to a violin maker and ask him or her to set it up for you with a new bridge, the chinrest, tailpiece, (and possibly matching pegs – optional), and of course the new Pirastro strings. You can actually do this all yourself. I reworked all my violins. But reworking the bridge and fitting new pegs requires special tools that you probably don’t have. You might need to shop around for a ‘reasonable’ luthier in your area. You also might buy the chinrest, and tailpiece there as well. I’d recommend having new pegs fitted too during this process just because hand-fitted pegs will probably be better than the factory fitted ones, but that’s not really necessary.

This may sound expensive, but most violin makers will set up a violin for well under $100 and some may also fit new pegs for that price too.

So now you’ve got a superb instrument for $80, plus free strings, plus about $25 worth of parts, and maybe $100 luthier bill for a grand total of $205. (Say about $250 if you actually buy the strings) But your violin will now be the envy of people who have spent as much as $500 for a violin that wasn’t even properly set up and has crappy strings on it.

In fact, I’ve had many people who own expensive violins drooling over my “Eighty Dollar Wonder”.

On by the way, I’d recommend a single loop-end fine tuner on the E-string only. With the Evah synthetic strings you shouldn’t have a problem tuning the others. Just be careful never to over-tune! Always start low and work up and us a tuning meter. Tune each string a little bit at a time bringing them all up to tension together in steps. The Evah’s will remain in good turn very quickly. And as they stretch they do so fairly equally. So over-all the instrument stays in relative tune even though it may fall out of absolute tune. You’ll just need to keep bringing it back up in the early days. The new violin itself will be shifting, bending, and settling for a while. But this will all calm down in time and it will be rock solid after a while.

By the way, you can always just play the Kennedy right out of the box for $80. In fact, I’d definitely do that first to make sure it doesn’t have any major problems! All this additional reworking will simply convert that $80 violin into a much more expensive instrument. The violin itself is well worth the extra effort and expense.

Just my thoughts on buying a first “inexpensive” violin. My reworked Kennedy has served me well for two years now. I did similar things to two other brands of violins, but time is short so their stories will need to go untold.

To begin with there is no such things as “self-teaching”, all a person can really do is “self-learn”, and that learning process almost always includes seeking out information from others. Those ‘others’ are the teachers of the ‘self-learner’.

Yes, it’s true that there is no substitute for a “good” live in-person instructor. However, pay attention to the word “good” in that sentence. There are a lot of so-called instructors who will merely push method books on you, give you standard tradition mythological crap, call that a lesson, and take your money! In my opinion there are so-called “teachers” out there that some budding violinist would be better off never meeting in-person.

I don’t mean to put down teachers. The good ones are a goldmine and if you can find one, more power to you. However, they will also probably be expensive because they will be in demand. But my main point is that just having a teaching is not always better than not having one. That ultimately depends on who the teacher is. I highly recommend a “good” teaching over self-learning, if one is available.

Having said all of that I’d like to make a few comments about ‘self-learning’.

First off, a good self-learner is constantly seeking teachers and/or teaching materials. They just aren’t going to be live, and in-person. Secondly, I personally believe that the myth about the dangers of starting out with bad habits is just that, a myth. I personally believe that this has merit if we are speaking about a very young child prodigy. However, once a person has reached their 20’s and beyond, they have passed the stage where their bad habits are going to become intuitively ingrained. In short, the dangers of ingraining bad habits early on are much more of a threat in very young children than it is for adults, because adults have past that stage of ingrained intuitive learning. They aren’t likely to ingrain new habits to the point where they won’t be able to correct them. Of course, totally poor poster, etc, is not good. But I give a little bit of credit to a mature self-learner to actually be reading materials and attempting to do things properly.

I began to learn violin with a Mel Bay video with Choral White as my “instructor”. It’s a boring video but she covers the importance of poster, etc., and does so very well on a technical level. It’s up to the self-learner to have the discipline to implement what she demonstrates on the video.

The second thing I did was buy a video called “The Art of Violin”. It’s not an instructional video (or at least is wasn’t meant to be. It’s just a video that shows the greatest violinists of the 20th century playing the violin. It’s two hours long and I have watched this video over and over quite literally a hundred times by now. The reason is because I’m continually asking these great violinists what posture they use simply by watching how they play.

The idea is not to imitate but rather to see what is possible and what is not.

For example Kogan stands in perfect poster almost like a statue and plays the violin holding it perfectly horizontally almost as if it is fixed in space. However, someone like Elman is hunched over and bends and twists his body while he plays sometimes holding the violin almost vertically with the scroll well down low. Each of the great violinists had their own style.

Another thing that I noticed. I was having problems trying to figure out where to hold my left thumb whilst playing. I went on the Internet and asked people and got a myriad of answers. I finally decided to turn to the pros, so I watch them play again. They all hold their left thumb differently. For example, you never see Menuhin left thumb on the videos. He holds it well below the neck of the violin. However, Heifetz holds his thumb well above the finger board as he plays.

In short, there many things about playing a violin that are simply a matter of individual taste. I personally believe that it’s better to do what feels right for you rather than trying to conform to the way that other people think it should be done. If a teacher were to dictate how I should hold my left thumb I think I would quite the lessons right there and then. Everyone is not the same and there is no “one way” to play the violin.

There are some ground rules. Like not letting the violin neck rest in the ‘Y’ of you left hand. Learning to keep your fingers well arched early on so you’ll be used to this later as you progress. Choral White covers most of these important things in the Mel Bay video. If you glean every little detail that you can from her lessons (and force yourself to pay attention to those details) you should be just fine.

It’s entirely possible to self-learn the violin IMHO. Especially for a musician who is already familiar with music and playing other instruments.

I think EVERYONE should play the violin, at least in passing. It’s a GREAT experience! I LOVE IT!

As a final note, anyone who is planning on becoming a professional concert violinist should definitely seek out the very best teacher(s) they can find and afford. No doubt about that! However, for those who can't afford a good teacher, or who can't find one, self-learning is better than not playing at all IMHO. Any bad habits that an adult falls into are not going to become that ingrained that they can't be corrected unless they play sloppy for quite a few years. But in the short term they just aren't going to ingrain bad habits. That problem only applies to very young child prodigies who are still in their developmental years. Their bad habits will become ingrained to an instinctual level. More to the point, "proper" posture would become ingrained at the instinctual level in a young child which is ulitimatly more important. And finally, a young child probably isn't going to pay attention to anything that Choral White says. :happy:

I forgot to address the question of lesson plans, or method books. I think that all depends on what type of music a person is interested in learning to play. Wohlfarht and Kreutzer have some good exercises. Normally I think people start with Wohlfarht and move up to Kreutzer. I started right in on Kreutzer myself (albeit slowed way down in tempo).

I provide the following link just for the MIDI examples, you can download the score for free on a lot of web sites. Or if you have a sheet music program like Melody Assistant or Finale Notepad just open the midi files into sheet music.

Kreutzer: Studies (1-42) - COMPLETE sheet music for viola solo

There are also of course, many different method books available. I never used any of those so I have no clue what they are like. I think the student’s knowledge of music in general should be taken into account when selecting method books.

Instead of using method books I use a different method. For example, I’m interested in playing the Bach partitas and sonatas for solo violin. So I open them with a sheet music program. Then look through for phrases that I think I could learn. I just cut and past various phrases from different places of the works into a cute little practice exercise. It works for me because I’m learning simple stuff whilst simultaneously actually practicing real passages from music that I’d like to learn how to play.

Here’s an example of one of my homemade etudes made from Bach excerpts (4kb *.mid)

http://www.csonline.net/designer/ideas/etude201.mid

I would also highly recommend practicing doubles ASAP. I know that’s a bit much for someone who’s just starting out. But the point is that once you’ve played a few doubles then going back to playing single-note melodies seems like a piece of cake!

And don’t forget to play popular simple tunes, like Bridge Over Trouble Water, Ashokan Farewell, and things like that. Simple tunes that are easy to play.

Disclaimer: All of my advice here is just for the casual learner. I am not suggesting that any of this will help a person to become a professional concert violinist. A teacher/mentor is an absolute MUST for that type of professionalism.

I would get a teacher, but ask around, don't just go for the first teacher that you hear of, you'll need a good teacher. And of course, who can forget practicing?