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.

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!

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!