Progress Report: Three Months of Fiddle
Posted on April 12, 2019
Today marks the third month of learning to play violin. I wish I could say this was as successful as my first two months, but, as I wrote before, I’ve had more trouble sticking to daily practice. A lot of this is due to simply being exhausted when coming home from work… so hopefully, as things shift, I’ll have more energy to put back into practice again.
So, as to not concentrate on the bad, I do want to talk about what I made progress on. Since last month, I have practiced up to exercise #117, which is The Banana Boat Song. Song #118 seems a bit difficult to tackle, so for now, I’ve skipped it and moved to the series of technical exercises that start with #119.
These are mostly variation of scales and practices, which are all good for daily revisiting (even if I don’t get anything else done). There’s a whole page of short scales and tunes, so I think I’m going to focus on these on the tired days, if nothing else. Maybe by the time I’ve got some scale practice in, I’ll feel more up to playing something more.
I did start practicing the slur technique this month. Also, I removed one of the tapes from my fingerboard, and really, haven’t had much trouble with that. Still not quite ready to remove the other tape, though!
I also wonder if it’s time to weave something new into my practice. I know that Jim at Fiddling for Older Folks has good things to say about the FiddleHed online lessons. I signed up for a trial account there last month, but something came up that weekend, and I wasn’t really able to explore the lessons or site as much as I’d have liked. I got an email from FiddleHed yesterday that offered a pretty sweet discount for trying my first month (I assume since I haven’t acted on the account in a while), and I think I might just take up that offer.
I’ve heard good things about the site, and a full month access to all of the tutorials would allow me to get a better feel for where I stand in my own progress vs. what the site offers to see if it provides value. Plus, to add a little something different in my practice might spark excitement. I really love my instruction book, but even I know I need to change things up from time to time. So this might just be the perfect thing to lead into a new month of practice!
I’ll keep you posted!