After around two weeks of practicing the violin for school, I think that I’ve learned a few more things that have contributed to my progress in playing. This week I’ll write about some of the things I’ve learned in the past week.
One of the first things that I learned was that I’ve been tightening my bow a bit too tight when I played. A senior student in my class mentioned it to me while I was playing in class. The way you’re supposed to tighten the bow is so that you can fit a pinky in between the bow hairs and the stick. I thought that it meant that you could fit your pinky in between without moving the hairs. But apparently, the hairs should move a bit as you put your pinky in giving it more slack. It’s made the bow less bouncy when I play making my tone sound less scratchy.
I also learned how to play two octaves of the G Major scale from the open G string up to the first G on the E string. The teacher went over the fingerings for the notes in the scale. This makes it so that I have a better understanding of where each note is on the fingerboard so that I don’t have to rely on fingerings to play songs.
The last thing that I’ve been learning is slurring between notes. Right now in the practice book the songs are starting to use slurs, so I had to learn how to do them at least between two notes. Slurs are when you play more than one note in one bow stroke. For me, the hard part isn’t the left hand since it is pretty much just hammer-ons and pull-offs in guitar. However, coordinating the bowing hand so that I bow far enough to hear the second note is still kind of difficult.
Overall, those were the main things I’ve learned/been practicing. I’ve tried to do some vibrato, but it’s still pretty hard for me to implement it into actual playing. However, I think I’m still making some good progress in my playing, and learning the violin hasn’t actually been too hard so far.