Teach Yourself Violin

Thanks for stopping back by my blog today.  I got quite a few encouraging e-mails after I made my post last night, so I just wanted to thank everyone who dropped me a line.

Today I figure I will talk about a few that the things that you need to focus on if you want to teach yourself violin.  We already established yesterday that you need to spend a minimum of 30 minutes a day practicing (I usually try to spend 1 – 2 hours – the same amount I’d spend if I had to pay for violin lessons), but what should you be practicing during that time?

The first thing that I think is that you need to learn to read sheet music.  It isn’t as difficult as it looks.  With a little bit of instruction and some practice, you’ll be able to pick up on it really quickly.  What I would do when I first started was take a sheet of music, and play the notes as slow as I needed to, one at a time, and then do that over and over.  Eventually I would be able to make it up to the speed that they should be played at.

Once you’ve gotten this down pat, you’ll be able to focus on playing music from memory – being able to play violin music after merely hearing it played.  I promise it’s a lot easier than it sounds once you get the hang of it.

Next you need to spend some time just listening to the music that you are trying to play (whether it is classical, country or anything else) and get a feeling for the rhythm.  No matter how well you learn violin, if you can’t keep with the rhythm of the music, it won’t turn out well.

Once you practice each of those skills a little bit, the next important thing to focus on is muscle memory.  This will allow your fingers to know exactly how to play a piece of music without having to think about it or read it at all.  This simply takes lots and lots of time repeating the same piece over and over.  It may sound tough, but if I can do it, you can teach yourself violin well enough to develop muscle memory.

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I hope today’s points will make it a little bit easier for you to understand how easy it is to sit down and learn violin at home.  I am going to try to find time tomorrow to actually go through and point out some of the specific things that I did when I was first learning (and most of which I still do) to play.  Thanks again for reading, and I encourage you all to keep the nice e-mails coming!

Thanks for checking out my blog!  In my first post, I want to share with you a few basics that you’ll need to know when it comes to learning to play violin.  I have only been playing for around eight months now, but already have learned enough to play with a small, local band, and also a local orchestra.  I hope that my tips will help you.  Take into consideration that I taught myself to play at home – without having to take violin lessons.

If you’re trying to teach yourself violin, you need to know the major parts of the violin.  The instrument that you’ll use to play the violin is called the bow.  It consists of the “stick” and the “hair”.  This is very important to keep in good shape, because it will directly affect the quality of music that it plays.

On the violin itself, you need to know a little bit about the strings.  Violins consist of four strings – the E-string, A-string, D-string, and G-string.  Each string, along with where you place your fingers on them, are going to produce a distinct pitch.

Once you have the general basics of everything down, and are ready to learn violin at home, you need two very important things – a good system for learning, and practice time.

It is recommended that you get at least 30 minutes a day in on practice time, but I always try to get 1 – 2 hours’ worth of playing.  I find it really important that I do my practicing in a quiet location or room, because any distraction seems to totally throw me off.  Don’t try to practice somewhere where you are going to get easily distracted.  If you do that, you’ll find that it will take longer to teach yourself violin than you planned for.

Later I’m going to try and make another post talking a little bit more about methods to learning violin at home.  I’ve never taken violin lessons, and don’t think you need to either.  Check back tomorrow for my next update!