Perpetual Motion is one of the most notorious pieces in Suzuki Book 1. Just say the name to any violin teacher or Suzuki parent and you'll get a heavy sigh. "Oh, THAT one." When I tell people that I have 8 students all at some stage of Perpetual Motion, I get condolences.

It's true, Perpetual Motion haunts my sleep. Out of sheer survival instinct, I've developed a variety of ways to both prepare students for Perpetual Motion so that when they actually learn it on the violin, we get through the piece in a matter of weeks.

1. Singing

• The first thing students do is listen to Perpetual Motion and learn to sing it. 
  
• I always have my students write their own words to their Suzuki Book 1 songs. The rules are simple: one syllable per note, to keep the rhythm steady, and the words can be anything they want. This helps the student be expressive, connect to the rhythm and pitch pattern, and remember the order. If you assign different words to repetitive phrases, they'll be easy to remember. 
  
• Singing in solfege. I teach my students to sing solfege syllables on scales and other patterns from the first lesson. By the time they're at Perpetual Motion, singing their songs in solfege is a normal thing for them. Singing in solfege also helps them connect to the relationship between the pitches.
• IF your student is reading all the notes in the A Major Scale by this point, you can also have them sing note names.

2. Scales and Finger Patterns

• I make sure that my students can play an A Major one octave scale, the arpeggios, and the scale in broken thirds.
• I also do a ton of finger patterns featuring broken thirds and fourth fingers.
• We do the A Major Scale in two different bowings: martele in the upper half for the Perpetual Motion singles, and then detache doubles in the middle of the bow for the doubles. This prepares the bow strokes.

3. Basic Technique

• If a student is struggling with basic elements of technique such as left hand position, holding the violin up, or bow hold, I correct these through review songs or supplemental repertoire before tackling Perpetual Motion.

4. Awareness of Musical Form

• The large scale form of Perpetual Motion is A B C A (using 4-bar phrases). That can be broken down into a a' b b' c c a a' (using 2-bar phrases). I write this on the music for the student and sing through the piece with them so they can see where exactly each section is.
• I always point out that the difference between a and a' is that a ends on the note E and a' ends on the note A. The same goes for b and b'.
• Any awareness of patterns will help build the connection between the student and the piece.

Once you've prepared the student to sing the song in a variety of ways, trained their fingers to do all the patterns required in the piece, and trained the bow to do the different bow strokes, teaching them the actual piece goes much, much smoother.

I hope this helps students, parents, and teachers who are working on Perpetual Motion, and I'd love to hear any tips or tricks you have for teaching it!

Wow. I can't believe how many views I had on the first post in this series. That's what putting "Disney" in the title of a post will do for you, I guess. I hope we get just as many on this one, because just buying things with music and violins on them is only part of the practice puzzle. If you're just joining us, check out Part 1 here.

The second piece is having your children take ownership of their violin playing. If your child is old enough to play violin, they're old enough to be taught ownership. Sometimes, when you're a kid, you feel like your life is completely controlled by the adults around you (and let's be honest - it usually is). That can result in a feeling of powerlessness. If violin is something that a kid feels they have no control over, it will almost certainly be one of the things that they use when they start testing their limits.  I have quite a few students in my studio who are creative, intelligent kids who love violin but refuse to practice because it is something their parents want them to do, and they're at the stage where they don't want to do what their parent tells them, regardless of whether it's cleaning their room or practicing violin.

An important public service announcement: Violin should always, always be more the child's thing than the parent's thing. Being a violinist is the child's identity. We want our kids to play violin because they love it, want to make music, and want to play well. They should never feel obligated to play to live out their parents' dream or to fit into some pre-determined notion of what the perfect child does. Music is not a box to check on the list of well-rounded extracurricular activities. It is a passion, and creating art is one of the highest privileges of being human.

It's true that there will be stages where the parent needs to motivate the student and keep them practicing when they rather wouldn't, but playing the violin should at its core be something that the student wants for their life. There is a big difference between not wanting to play music and not wanting to practice.  

Violin lessons (like pretty much everything) start with the parent doing everything for the child and end with the child doing everything. This process takes years, especially if the student starts young. Remember that your eventual goal is to have your child driving themselves to lessons, practicing independently, organizing their own schedule - and one day, even paying for their own lessons (if they continue to play through college and into adulthood).

So, how do you teach your kids to take ownership of their violin playing? You start from the very first day.

• Have them carry their own instrument. Violins come in fractional sizes for a reason. If they're old enough to play the violin, they're old enough to carry the case responsibly. No matter how much they whine, no matter how much they drag their feet, make them carry their own violin. It's an important part of the bonding process between violinist and violin, and essential for ownership.
• Students should prepare their own violin and bow for playing. They should open the case, attach any shoulder rest or sponge, and tighten/rosin the bow. Very young children will need to be guided by their parents in this, but learning proper care and  setup of the instrument is critical. They need to learn it as soon as possible!
• Students should fill out their own practice charts. If your teacher gives you a practice chart, let the student take responsibility for checking off each item on the chart as you complete it. If your teacher doesn't give you a practice chart, check The Practice Shoppe and have the student fill in their assignments! If your child isn't comfortably writing yet, the parent can fill in the chart, but the child should check everything off. Let them choose a special pen or a colored pencil or crayon to mark off the chart. 
• Let students choose the order of practice. Let your child choose what to do first. The rule should be that they have to do everything on the chart, but they can pick the order.
• Give your child a choice about when to practice. Whether or not the student practices should not be a choice. Except in extreme circumstances, practice is every day. However, you can give the child a choice about when they are going to practice. One of my parents told me that she gives her son a choice: Either he can practice before his tv time OR he can practice right after dinner. If he chooses not to practice before tv time, then he must practice after dinner.
• Involve your students in the communication process with the teacher. As soon as they're old enough, the student should be the one emailing the teacher with questions or with scheduling issues. It can be from the parents' email account if they don't have their own, but the student should take responsibility for communicating with the teacher. If the student isn't old enough, they should sit with the parent while the parent contacts the teacher and give input. Again - ownership. It's their violin lesson. 

The point of all of this is to help your student feel like violin is theirs. Once a student really takes ownership of their violin playing, they will feel a sense of ownership and pride. Knowing that they can set a goal for themselves, create a plan to accomplish that goal, and execute their will build true self-esteem and confidence. They will be healthier, happier, and more responsible human beings and dedicated, creative, passionate musicians.

If you've been following along from the beginning, today is the final day of the 28 Day Practice Project. The point of this project was never to practice for 28 days straight, but to use the unique focus of each week to gain new insights into your playing and your practice habits.

As you might imagine from my previous blog posts, I had a whole bunch of reflection questions planned for the end of this project, but I've decided to keep it much more simple and open-ended.

There's really just one thing that matters: Did this month change your practicing?

You can go deeper into this question, naturally - how, specifically, did your practicing change? Did you like it? Did you get better as a violinist? What will you be incorporating into your practice routine from here on out? - but the main question remains: has your practicing been changed by this experience?

For me, being accountable to my students and the entire internet for my practicing really helped my own practice. I'm in a new stage of my life as a violinist. For the last sixteen years, I was a violin student. I attended weekly lessons, was in school or youth orchestras, and school-run chamber groups. My musical life was very structured. I graduated from Peabody with my master's degree in May and to be honest, my personal practice has been very unstructured. I wasn't sure what to address in my technique. I wasn't sure what repertoire worked for me to play. And with no one to be accountable to and a teaching career to start building, my energy went into designing structure for my students, not my personal practice.

This project got me practicing regularly again. Well, this project, and the recital I had last week! The best practice motivation I've found is having a performance to prepare for. The other thing I realized is how much I need structure in my practicing. I practice best when I have a plan made in advance that includes exactly what to practice and how much time I have to practice it. Knowing that I had to blog about my practice and that my students would see how much I practiced on the chart in our studio really added extra motivation.

Thank you so much to all of you for following this series of posts. I really hope they've helped you. And if you're just joining us, here are the links to all the posts in the 28 Days of Practice series.

Introduction
Week 1
Week 1 Reflections
Week 2
Week 2 Reflections
Week 3
Week 3 Reflections
Week 4

Thank you all. Stay posted for something dramatically different coming on the blog in the coming weeks, as we approach holiday recital season!

It's the end of Week 2 of our 28 Day Practice Project, and it's time to reflect. Answer the questions based on your experience, and I'll share mine as well below. Check back tomorrow morning for Week 3!

1.    How do you feel you improved as a violinist this week?

2.    Was it easy to find time to practice? When were the best times for you to practice? Was anything hard about finding practice time?

3.    Did you practice more days this week than you did last week?

4.    Did you succeed in practicing seven days in a row? If not, what happened on the days that you missed? Looking back, could you have done anything differently on those days in order to find practice time? 

5.    How did you need to rearrange or change your schedule to make practicing happen?

6.    Did you like practicing every day?

7.    How long were your practice sessions?

This project is designed for students at every level, from the five-year-olds in my beginning class (and their parents), to professionals. The reflection questions are very open-ended and relevant to all, and often, modifications are given for the more advanced practicer. For example, during Week 2: Putting In The Time, students are challenged to practice every single day. However, for a student who already practices on a daily basis, they might have a goal of practicing for a certain amount of time every day.

This Saturday, I'm launching a special project in my studio. It's called "28 Days of Practice," and the purpose of the project is for me and my students to explore our practice habits and to become more self-aware in our practice. Hopefully, we'll all learn one or two things about how we practice that we can incorporate into our regular routine.

The project is structured in four weeks, with a different focus each week. There will be reflection questions as well as specific tasks. I will be doing this along with my students and will post my answers to the questions on the blog! Talk about accountability - anyone who reads this will know if I'm practicing or not! 

So, just to whet your appetite I present you with the titles of the four weeks:

Week One: Starting Where You Are
Week Two: Putting In The Time
Week Three: Identifying Your Practice Habits
Week Four: Setting Goals

I'll post the guidelines for each week on the blog so you can follow along! Feel free to do it along with us and to post your progress and reflections in the comments!

As a teacher, I'm constantly amazed by my students' busy schedules. They swim, dance, play piano, sing, and soccer, among other things. They take lessons in public speaking and are in numerous clubs at their schools. AND they take violin lessons. I'm rarely surprised, then, when students come into their lessons and explain that they only have one or two days a week when they have time to practice. 

I'm not going to launch into a lecture here about how violin should be the most important thing in your life. If you want to have a career in music, it is, and you should be practicing 2 - 4 hours a day by the time you're in high school. If you're taking auditions for District or Regional orchestra, you should at the minimum be practicing an hour a day. That's just what it takes. You simply won't be accepted to these orchestras or to music school if you're not practicing this much, because believe me, your competition is practicing even more.

But this post is for all the students who love music, who love playing violin, and who know that they probably are going to do something else with their careers. And to them, I say this: Even on your busiest days, you can find ten minutes for violin.

Ten minutes might seem like nothing, but you can pack in a lot of practicing into those ten minutes if you plan it right. And, believe it or not, a student who practices ten minutes every day will make more progress than a student who practices an hour one day a week. That's because when it comes to developing the skills needed to play the violin, consistent repetition is key.

I think of my former teacher Burton Kaplan who says, "Your body is a dog." He means that you need to train your body the same way you would train your dog. If we only asked our dogs to sit and stay one or two days a week, we wouldn't expect them to learn those skills, would we? Your body is the same. If you practice for an hour on Thursday, and your lesson is the following Tuesday, it's simply not realistic to expect your body and brain to remember what you worked on or to play it the way you practiced it. 

Where do we find these ten magical minutes? It could be ten minutes as soon as you get home from school so you get it out of the way. It could be ten minutes right after dinner, before you start your homework. It could be ten minutes first thing in the morning. But find ten minutes. Put those ten minutes in your planner, and set an alarm on your computer or phone for five minutes before your ten minutes start so you know when it's practice time.

What do you do with those ten minutes once you find them? For a beginning student, practicing might simply consist of taking the violin out of the case, going from rest position to playing position ten times, making a bow hold ten times, and calling it a day. And the student who does that every single day will do better than the student who just does it one or two days. That process might take maybe five minutes.

For the more advanced student, who wants to learn skills like shifting and vibrato, consistency is again key. With your ten minutes, do any finger slides, wiggles - any of the little exercises your teacher has you do as you're learning these skills. As you do this, check to make sure your body is relaxed and poised and that your violin and bow position are good. Do these exercises in the mirror so you can see what's happening. After your exercises, play a scale with at least two different bowings (ask your teacher for specific directions). Then, if you have any time left over, play through your pieces.

4 minutes: Exercises in the mirror
3 minutes: Scale with two different bowings
3 minutes: Play through a piece.

And that's it! This ten-minute plan is only for your busiest days. If you can find more time, then go for it! Try it for a week and see if you notice any differences in your playing.

Remember, it's better to practice for only ten minutes than not at all. With creative scheduling and practice planning, you can really improve your violin skills. Give it a try!

We all want to get the most out of every experience we have, and music lessons are no exception. In order to make the best progress, we need to be well-prepared for our lessons and willing to communicate clearly with our teachers! I'm offering some suggestions here to help you improve your lesson experience. Some might seem like no-brainers, but hopefully everyone can find at least one tip to try.

1. Arrive five minutes early. One of the simplest things you can do to maximize your time with your teacher is to ensure that you get to your lesson on time - which means early. I know that most lessons take place after school and during rush hour when traffic is at its most frustrating. It is definitely worth it to find the best route to your teacher and to plan your schedule so you can arrive a few minutes early. This allows you to catch your breath, focus your attention, and unpack your instrument so that your lesson can start precisely on time. Most teachers won't give you extra time if you arrive late. In my studio, if you're scheduled for an hour-long lesson but you arrive 15 minutes late, you only get a 45 minute lesson. So, ensuring that you are on time and present for every scheduled minute of your lesson is one of the easiest ways to make the most of things.

2. Practice. This might seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many students show up at lessons without having practiced. A good teacher won't let you get away with this! I had a student last year who absolutely hated practicing her rhythm exercises. She wouldn't practice them at all at home, and in lessons she would often try and steer me away from the rhythm book. However, because I knew that developing her sense of pulse was necessary for her playing, I didn't let it slide. I gave her two options: either we would spend a lot of time practicing rhythm in her lesson and have less time for her pieces OR she could practice her rhythm at home and spend less time on it in the lesson. She opted for the second one once she realized that there was no way out of it.

Everyone wants the student to improve quickly and learn new pieces and new skills. This will only happen if practicing is happening consistently at home. Otherwise, the teacher will spend valuable lesson time explaining the same concepts over and over, which will lead to the student and their parents becoming very frustrated.

3. Record your lessons and watch them at home. Ask your teacher if you can record your lessons. I keep a digital video camera in my studio for my students' use. They can bring their own memory cards and record their lessons. Watching your lesson back at home will help you by allowing you to hear the teacher's instructions more times and by letting you see yourself playing from the outside. In your lesson, you might really feel that you are using a lot of bow and wonder why your teacher is so insistent on you trying to use even more. However, when you watch yourself, you may see that you really aren't using much at all.

4. Tell your teacher how you feel. Despite how it may seem at times, your teacher can't actually read your mind. If your teacher says that you don't understand, say out loud to your teacher, "I don't understand what you're saying." It is your teacher's job to find a way to explain things to you in a way that makes sense for you and your learning style! Don't just nod and smile - say what you're thinking and feeling. If your teacher is going too fast for you, say "Can you give me a second to process what you said before? I'm still trying to figure it out." 

Two other important things to tell your teacher: "This makes me feel really uncomfortable"  and "My hand/wrist/finger/back/neck hurts when I do it this way." Teachers are trained to be on the lookout for tension in your playing, but it makes things go a lot smoother if you can communicate with them clearly.

It is especially important to communicate clearly and directly with your teacher when you are new to each other. The teacher might use a metaphor that doesn't work for you, or they might start changing aspects of your playing that you thought were just fine before you came to them. Please don't just go home and complain to your parents about it. Give your teacher a chance to explain something in a different way or to tell you their reasoning behind something. 

5. Write down questions for your teacher as you practice and bring them to your lesson. As you practice during the week, keep a notebook or a practice journal and write down questions for your teacher. If you run into a problem area, such as a shift that you consistently miss, or doublestops that just don't feel right in your hand, write it down and ask your teacher about them in your lesson.

6. Clarify any confusion with your teacher before your lesson. If you're unsure about a fingering, or even just an illegible word in your notebook, send your teacher an email or give them a call during the week to ask. Don't practice confused! 

7. Keep your instrument in good working condition. It's critical to keep your instrument in shape just for your own playing. This means changing strings and getting your bow rehaired at least twice a year. It means taking your violin to the shop and having the pegs worked on if they're consistently slipping or sticking, and having any other needed repairs completed promptly. Chances are that your teacher is not a repair technician. Speaking from personal experience, I can put on strings and fix a bridge that's fallen over and that's really about it. Time that your teacher has to spend fighting with your instrument to tune it or fix anything with it is time taken away from your lesson. I've had experiences where a student purchased a very cheap instrument that had horrible pegs that wouldn't hold a pitch. I routinely spent 5 to 10 minutes of his 30 minute lesson just trying to get his violin to stay in tune, which wasn't how either one of us wanted to be spending the time. So, schedule repairs and maintenance in a timely manner!

I hope at least some of these tips are helpful to you as you continue your studies! Feel free to comment with any of your own suggestions for getting more out of your lessons!

This post is for everyone has big dreams for their violin playing but who doesn't like to practice very much. I know you're out there. In the words of my dear friend Greg Schenden, we're going Star Wars today!

If it isn't clear from the Yoda in my teaching studio (pictured at left), I'm more than a little bit of a Star Wars geek. And while there are so many characters, planets, and moments I love in the Star Wars trilogy (the original one), what I want to write about today is my least favorite part of the movie: Dagobah.

I'm someone who loves action. I want to see the X-Wings dogfight with the TIE Fighters. I want the lightsaber duels. I want to see those adorable Ewoks take down the stormtroopers. And of course, I want the happy, triumphant ending. Good over evil. BAM. Done.

What makes me really uncomfortable are all those icky middle bits, like Dagobah. It's my least favorite part in Empire Strikes Back, it's one of the most irritating and boring levels in the LEGO computer game...I just don't like it. I'd rather be flying an X-Wing, not waiting around in Dagobah for it to get out of the swamp.

In The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (an amazing must-read, but give yourself lots of time and be patient...), he writes about the stages of the hero's journey. Simplified, it goes something like this: the call, descent into the underworld, and return to the external world. Luke gets the call to be a Jedi when he meets Obi-Wan on Tatooine, he trains to become a Jedi on Dagobah with Yoda, and then he returns to the fight between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire, transformed. 

While I live for that final lightsaber duel in Return of the Jedi between Luke and Vader, I've been realizing more and more that Dagobah, back in Empire Strikes Back, is actually the most important part of the story. This is where Luke does the real work of becoming a Jedi. It's where he meets Yoda, his most important teacher. It's where he learns to connect with the Force and to find some measure of inner discipline. It's where he comes face to face with his biggest enemy: himself.

I think we can all identify with Luke. Luke wants to be a great Jedi, a great warrior. He wants to learn what he needs to know and get back out there to the action. He wants to skip ahead to the glorious parts and gloss over the hard, sweaty work. He sees himself taking on the Empire, flying off in his X-Wing and triumphantly defeating Vader. When he initially envisioned himself as a Jedi, he most certainly didn't see himself running laps around a swamp with a tiny green creature on his back pushing him harder and harder.

While most of us aren't training to save the universe as a Jedi, I do think there are a lot of parallels between the process of becoming a Jedi and the process of becoming a musician. When one feels the call to become a musician, we most likely see a performance of someone on stage and fall in love. We say to ourselves, "I want to do that." And instantly, in our mind, we see ourselves onstage playing the Tchaikovsky concerto before we even learn to hold the instrument. I know I'm certainly guilty of that. It's not a bad thing to have goals. What we need to realize, though, is where our goals are, realistically. A good violin teacher will not say "Okay, let's start Tchaikovsky!" More likely, you'll be given lots of scales, etudes, and pieces that are easier than Tchaikovsky. For years. It's a wonderful thing to have Tchaikovsky (or whatever your dream piece is) as a shining beacon for yourself. But you also have to run those laps around the swamp. You have to embrace the journey, come face to face with yourself and the reality of your violin playing right now, and put in the work.

How many of us, in our practicing, will play straight through a piece we love a couple of times and then call it a day? It's a lot more fun than practicing your scales, isn't it? It's not productive, though. Play-throughs as regular practice are a sure path to the dark side of sloppy and careless playing. Good practice that leads to the path of being a violin Jedi involves careful planning, attention to detail, and practicing and repeating small sections over and over again. Take a look at my blog post on Conscious Repetition for more on this.

The fact of the matter is that by focusing your attention on developing your skills, you actually are learning what you need to play your dream piece. I'll end this post by telling you a story from my own experience.

A few years ago, I learned the Tchaikovsky concerto for my graduate school auditions. It was a long, brutal process. The piece was definitely a "challenge" piece for me, and there was one passage in particular that just eluded me every time. For the violinists out there, it's that scale passage at the top of the fourth page, right after the second theme. Several long, fast scales that come at you one after another. I practiced this passage every way imaginable, and still, without fail, I blew it every single time I performed it.

I did, however, get into Peabody for graduate school (they stopped me before that passage in my audition), and I spent the next two years playing etudes and scales. I didn't touch Tchaikovsky or any repertoire of a comparable level to it. What I did do was play Kreutzer 2 for a month as I realigned my posture, reshaped my left hand, and essentially rebuilt my playing from the ground up. After my first year of grad school, I spent a summer only playing scales. Every key, three octaves. No repertoire.

During spring semester of my last year of grad school, I was having one of those practice days where I just wanted to play stuff. My year and a half of etudes and scales was really wearing on me. I'd finished my recital. So, just for the heck of it, I pulled out Tchaikovsky and just started playing, pretty mindlessly. When I got to that scale passage, I tossed it off like it was nothing. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't looked at it, hadn't practiced it, but because of the time I put in building the skills I needed to play it, I could.

The moral of this story is that Yoda is always right. And your personal Dagobah, all those icky middle bits of your journey, are actually the ones that will help you get to your goal. Do the work in the middle and don't be tempted down the path of only seeing the final product. For that path, young Jedi, leads to the dark side. And if you don't believe me, take it from the Jedi Master himself:

May the Force be with you. Now go play some scales!