You have the right to decide whether or not you are interested in a professional sport-related career. The fact that your parents made a conscious decision to send you to the musical instrument class of one of the finest classical schools in Boston should not make you feel that you have anything to lose in […]
Month: November 2020
Yes, a lot. If someone writes an instrumentation-rich piece of music like Liszt or Brahms and doesn’t know anything else about violin, they’ll get a lot more work done because they just want to make it sound great. If he has to worry about things like the size of the instrument, the sound of the […]
I haven’t studied it so I don’t know. In general, the easier you are to play the better your understanding of the instrument, but if you have a lot of wrong ways of thinking about it or you have already learned to play a difficult instrument and haven’t mastered it or learned anything special, the […]
No. The name “cello” refers to the combination of the instrument “c” and the strings as well as its sound. Because of the way it’s constructed and how it’s tuned, a “d” in the name makes no sense. Are all instruments made the exact same? Yes. It’s up to the user to make a unique […]
You know, like the good violinists can put out? In the studio? This post is also available as a podcast: This isn’t just some random thing I had in my mind – I tried hard to think of something cool, and I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted. I tried to make the […]
Fine tuners are usually used in conjunction with a violin case. They are generally not needed in the case of a violin if you are using a “standard” model or one where no alterations have been made to the body of the violin. Most fine tuned instruments come with a case, so the fine tuner […]
For this lesson, I will play an 8/8 time signature (which makes it easy to learn) so that you can start with the easy stuff and expand to the hardest stuff. Example 1. Example 2. Here is something called E major, which you could listen for in order to get a sense of the scale. […]
This is the question that has always fascinated me. How much did the violin used in this concert have to be worth? My friend David (my musician friend) asked me this question about ten years ago, and I was thinking, “This is the first time I’m questioning my worthiness to play a concert violin.” My […]
The first thing to do, as they say, is to choose a tuning, and to choose the string used, the one from which you use all your other strings. If you pick a cheap string (say a $1,000 one), you aren’t making up for any possible mistakes, and that will only make your playing bad. […]
We want to know, but we can’t because both have their origin in Europe. The other thing we can’t figure out – and I don’t think either of these things is true – is that for both these instruments the string and the bow are two parts of the instrument. The bow is a part […]