Category Lesson Notes
Vibrato Times Two
For two weeks in a row now we’ve zeroed in on vibrato in my lessons. I’ve been working with the technique for over a year now, in fits and starts, and I can’t deny that I’ve made some real progress – but I still have so far to go. This is my mantra with the […]
On Parsing and Pausing
We skipped two lessons over the holidays, so I had plenty of time to practice and make progress on my concerto movement. I think Teacher noticed the progress when we had our first lesson of the new year on Tuesday. During the lesson, we mainly focused on phrasing. She reminded me that with classical violin, […]
Time and Angles
When I started playing over three years ago, my practice sessions wouldn’t last more than 45 minutes, but as the months went by I started to increase my practice time. I worked up to days when I kept it up for over two hours. But then in July of 2015, I had a pretty significant […]
Practice, and Thanksgiving
I had my first lesson in the new place this past week, but the room where I will likely land to play permanently, a sunny corner of the dining room, is currently our staging area and the only remaining room that’s encumbered by boxes. Instead, I set up for our lesson in a corner of […]
Faster
As I approached this Seitz concerto I was a little bit stunned. Listening to Preucil play the piece on the CD prior to starting in on it the thing seemed a bit impossible. While the Suzuki recording star always records the tunes faster than I’m able to play them at first, the speed and complexity […]
Run Puppy
My lesson yesterday was fun – we played through my new Wohlfahrt etude, number four, which Teacher tells me can be thought of rhythmically as run puppy. It’s all repeating pattern of eighth then sixteenth notes. Run puppy run puppy run puppy run puppy. Having a mnemonic for the pattern helps quite a bit. Though […]
Interludes
In yesterday’s lesson we made it through the rest of the Seitz movement – challenges abound, and I’ll be working on it for a good while – there’s a section of double stops that’s my longest yet by far, and some chords at the end that are exceedingly tough to nail, including one that I’m […]
Seitz and More
The new Seitz movement – the First of the Fifth Concerto – is difficult, but also quite fun to work on. Last week’s lesson took me just a little over halfway through it. The section I started last week brought a shift from D Major to E Major – my first time working in the […]
A Pass on Seitz
Somehow, three months after starting it, I managed to play through the Seitz from memory for Teacher in Tuesday’s lesson, and she declared it passed. I had to be honest, of course, and told her that particular play-through was the second time ever I’d accomplished the big doubled sixteenth note section of the piece without […]
Ryan Libel 