So,

I was looking around for at-home workout tips the other day, and I stumbled upon this article on mental well-being by the UK’s NHS (National Health Service) and the 5 pointers they offered in their article made me think that the violin is a one-stop cure for mental well-being! Ok, maybe it’s a bit of stretch to make a bold statement like that in public (although I actually felt my head nodding in agreement as I scrolled down the article), so we’ll just say that the violin is a magical instrument with musical properties. Or, did I mean to say, a musical instrument with magical properties? Same thing, but someone had to say it. 😍

Here were the 5 tips they highlighted, and here’s my own thought process about it that kept my head nodding like a bobble-head character…

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1) Connecting with other people (brings us happiness)

Whether we’re talking about going for lessons, or coming to our music+food bi-monthly class meetings, or simply looking for a tip online (by the way, be careful about what you copy from Youtube - always check with your teacher about what you’ve found!!!)… the natural presence of physical human contact, and the dynamism of communication between people at any music-motivated meeting is simply undeniable. It’s been said before but bears repeating: making music is a community endeavour - it always has been and always will be like this, and we’re al very grateful for it!

2) Being physically active (brings us happiness)

Uhm.. yeah! On the violin (or any other instrument for that matter), there are a lot of muscles pumping in unison, in a very specific order and quantity. Don’t get me wrong though, playing the violin DOES NOT REPLACE EXERCISE (ergo my original intention of getting online for workout tips for the home, now that it’s getting cold outside), although it does keep your body constantly active. Mentally, too. So, don’t go abandoning your habitual workouts just yet, but keep in mind that working on upgrading your violin-playing skills beats mindless scrolling on your phone EVERY-SINGLE-TIME !

3) Learning new skills (brings us happiness)

Enough said. Moving on.

4) Giving to others (brings us happiness)

Play for someone, or join us in our intimate bi-monthly class reunions, or, even better, now that Christmas is on its way, brush off the cobwebs between your fingers (haha, JUST KIDDING!!!) and sign up for a Christmas-carol group and offer to keep their rhythm and intonation in check! Just remember to first work a lot on scales, with some serious counting and bowing patterns, and varying metronome speeds, before committing to a task like that!!! 😜😜😜

5) Paying attention to the present moment with mindfulness (brings us happiness)

Between you and me, I think we can agree there’s plenty of that involved in playing the violin. The sheer mental concentration required to perfect that one specific muscle control at last week’s lesson probably didn’t even give us the satisfaction of a decent outcome. But we keep at it because the reward is too great to renounce… No further explanation required here!

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SO interesting, isn’t it? That’s of course not to say that we should all pick up the violin ONLY as an escape from sad days, although feeling better at the end of a tough day as a result of shutting out the noise in order to focus on a specific finger drill on the violin certainly can be a happy consequence too, but I prefer to take this article on mental wellness as a surprising reminder how multi-faceted this gorgeous, complex instrument really is. The surprises never end, I promise, and I’ve heard the same expressions of awe and disbelief from some of the wisest people I know, so we’re certainly in good company. And amazingly, despite all of our cultural and personal differences, the one common denominator for all of us is that, between our heads, our hands and our violin, we’ve got a fully-equipped laboratory for the search of all things good and whole. And, looking ahead to the coming winter months… I’m going to say it already - HOW AWESOME IS THAT?

Until we meet next, keep warm, safe, and well, everyone…

and of course…

HAPPY PRACTISING!!!!

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Had a full day at school or work and now you’ve come home with an exhausted body and tired mind, but still want to practise a little on the violin so that you keep progressing? Renouncing on practicing altogether seems at first to be the first choice, but it quickly turns out that NOT practising for more than 3 days can easily give way into a whole myriad of troubles with catching up, personal frustration, and very simply, just more fatigue in general. Indeed, not having a regular practice schedule quickly reveals itself as a short-term non-solution with real, very annoying, long-term consequences, as those of us who have gone more than 3 days away from the violin can testify.

What to do?

Follow these steps outlined here can help you quickly get back on track, and soon be playing your favourite pieces to your heart’s content!

1) If starting exhausted, the very first thing to do is to acknowledge that you are, in fact, exhausted. Denial will not be a friend here. But practising tired has a very therapeutic effect, if done right! Before starting, take a good stretch on your back, arm and neck muscles, and breathe a heavy and happy sigh of relief that this is your time now, for you! And then, perhaps, make yourself a strong cup of tea (with honey?), and know that this is the time to go into relaxed focus. (We learn much better and efficiently in this state, whereas anxiety will trigger the brain’s inclination towards CANCELLING the whole experience, and that’s definitely NOT what we want to happen with our hard-earned practice progress!!!)

2) Now that you’re ready, pick 1 or 2 purely mechanical things to work on / learn (technique and scales are our best tools here), and set the bar at a manageable level. Next, without compromising on the highest quality of concentration and of sound production, do 3 repetitions of this small technique and pause to re-evaluate. Figure out what needs to change in order to get those repetitions perfect each time, with no hurry but with a quiet certainty. When the technique is stable, there are a couple of things we can do to master it: Adding the number of repetitions when 3 is easy; raising the speed up a notch for precision and strength; switching up bowing combinations…. every item on this list makes the technical work seem so much more challenging, and the moment you master one and feel the exhilaration rushing through you, congratulate yourself, because you have just entered the positive cycle of self-motivation!!!

3) Picking 1 or 2 small sections of a musical piece (we don’t call them songs anymore) you are working on, perhaps a 4-bar phrase or 2-bar transitional passage, work in the same way! Choosing a speed, or tempo, that is comfortable but not TOO comfortable, work on small sections first by dealing with the mechanical aspects, and then the musical aspects (like vibrato, for example). Work for real stability: after having ‘nailed it’, and celebrated a little maybe because it was the first time you managed to play through the passage without hesitating, repeat as necessary in order to make it ‘your own’: so that you would be able to pick up the violin and play it anywhere, without needing to squint at the fingerings on the page. In a sense, it’s learning the music by heart, but it’s much more than just memorising the movements - it truly is LEARNING the music! When we KNOW the music, we can switch our brains off (from fear, doubt and anxiety) a little a finally enjoy ourselves in the process of playing it for others!!

So that’s how it goes!

When you’ve practiced effectively, you feel stronger at the end of each session, and much happier inside, because our instinct for productivity has been satisfied, and there’s no better feeling in the world!

Next practice session, it’s wash, rinse, repeat, but only after checking very quickly that the items from the last practice session are holding their shape! Remember, it should be a quick check, not a repetition of the last session, since, we want to move on! This makes the quality of each practice session so much more valuable, and practising becomes a little more demanding, but so much more satisfying!!!

and, after having all this information, know also that …

you’re not alone!

If you’re a member of our current class, let the Practice Logs help you along!

Or, let the community help you (cue Facebook), reach out to the other learners around you, and don’t be afraid to learn through your mistakes! That’s how we all grow.

GOOD LUCK, AND HAPPY PRACTISING!!!

X.O.

Travelling all the time without too much time to stop and regroup?

We’ve all been there, what with easy travel options and the need to get away from city life… but the violin experience doesn’t have to stop when you leave your town of residence!

Violin progress seems to come to such a standstill for every one of us every time we take a break from lessons. And since lesson time is so precious, we do almost nothing else than to focus almost exclusively on how to make our fingers and arms function better on the fingerboard and bow… that there’s barely any time at all to talk about everything else outside of the violin lesson - and that’s where the real experience starts!

So then, it follows quite logically that when we don’t have time with the violin, we are presented with a special opportunity to work on the other aspects of our musical literacy and culture - things like note-identification and understanding the anatomy of scales (so that we’re not drawing a mental blank when we are on the violin, and can in fact focus on where our fingers, and not why they go where they go)!

And we like these special opportunities on the bus/train/plane! Considering that a concerto usually lasts anywhere between 25 minutes to an hour (I might be wrong, so please correct me), instead of playing Candy Crush for hours on end and then hating yourself (we’ve all been there) for having literally gotten nowhere with our time, how about discovering a little Beethoven, or Bach, or Tchaikovsky? The added advantage to this is that, with our headphones on, we hear so much more than what a crappy laptop/phone speaker could ever offer. Double-win!

So, instead of rambling on about the benefits of learning on the go…. here are some truly awesome resources I personally love that can help grow our musical awareness, in an inspiring and very enjoyable way!

1) Youtube Inspiration from the Masters of the violin

Go to the section ‘Our Idols’ on the homepage of the VSG website. There’s a reason this section is named like this. Pick a musician, or a composer, or an instrument, and start exploring! You never know what you’ll find if you don’t start looking! So go ahead, and enjoy the legacy these great humans have left for us.

2) Work on your Music Theory!

A fantastic online resource can be found here: https://www.musictheory.net/lessons. They even have a mobile app that costs very little, but I’ve been told it’s only available right now on Apple phones. Boo. But the good news is, with a computer and an internet connection, you can learn just about anything from note-identification to Roman numeral musical analysis! I only wish I had this when I was a young’un. Never too late, though!!!

3) Listen to Podcasts to see what other musicians are up to

Nathan Cole and his wife Akiko Tarumoto have a funny, honest, and very self-effacing sense of humour in their podcast Stand Partners for Life. As important members of the LA Philharmonic Orchestra, they know what they’re talking about when it comes to conductors, orchestra etichette, and growing up in very different environments as young musicians. Of the several channels that are available around the internet, this is the one I most highly recommended.

https://www.natesviolin.com/the-stand-partners-for-life-podcast/

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So that’s it for now!

Find the thing or the people that inspire you most, and, who knows, you just might be well on your way to building your very own personal, robust, very lively, musical culture! No more stunned silences when the conversation leaves the world of finance and politics… you’re going to have so much to contribute (and educate the others around you about), now!

ENJOY, BE INSPIRED, AND HAPPY PRACTISING!!!

Picking up an instrument for the first time and expecting to be able to play it in a short amount of time is no joke, especially when it’s your VERY FIRST playing experience! Follow these 3 pointers and you’ll be off on a better start than before you chanced upon this information!

1) Be prepared to accept that playing is an ACTIVE experience!

Most first-timers (adult students, I’m looking directly at you!) associate PLAYING (active) with their past experiences of LISTENING (passive), which are two distinctly different activities. Sure, we do need to listen intently (but actively!) while playing, especially in a group, but you’ll soon learn that, with the instrument in hand, your attention needs to become laser-focused!

2) Muscles take some time to learn even the simplest movements!
It may not seem obvious, but our bodies are made of living organic material (as opposed to steel machine parts)… haha! What I mean by this is that we often build up a mental ideal that’s so far removed from reality that the only thing left after is guaranteed disappointment.

Especially when dealing with your first instrument experience ever, let go of your crazy expectations, find out first what your arms and body want to do naturally, and then course-correct from there. Relax, be curious, and you’ll find that with much less stress, you’ll quickly be on your way to one of the most exciting personal discoveries you could imagine!

3) Our bodies need some preparation

As an extension to the previous point, our bodies aren’t made to function like machines. Instead, what we DO have is supple tissue, ready to be shaped by whatever tasks we decide to pick up, on a regular basis! That said, before the shaping begins, we want to make sure we start with minimal tensions, accumulated stress, etc, as far as we can manage. In practical terms, this means that if we’re coming from a long day of work and we’re setting up for our lesson on a Friday evening (some of you may be laughing right now!), take the luxury of a stretch, a yawn, anything to get the oxygen circulating again in your knees, back, and shoulders! Your body’s going to thank you for this, and believe it or not, so will your sound! Do the right thing, stand up now from your desk, and swing your arms around a little!

(If nobody’s looking, GO CRAZY and turn it into a full-blown dance party!)

Stay healthy, keep your bodies happy, and talk soon!
X.O.