Learn The Violin In 1 Month — Max’s Monthly Challenge (S1, E1)
I love learning… perhaps I obsess over learning.
My happiness is so strongly tied to constantly growing.
I also love the idea of a ‘renaissance man’ or ‘polymath’ which is a person with a wide range of knowledge and skills.
With this in mind (and inspired by amazing YouTuber MikeBoyd & blogger Max Deutsch) I’ve started a new project called ‘Max’s Monthly Challenge’ where every month I’ll tackle a new task and document the journey. These may range from skills, fitness challenge, social challenges or anything else!
This first challenge is to learn the violin in a month. It was hard to pick a specific goal so I left it open with the goal to play an enjoyable piece by the end of the month.
It turns out the violin isn’t too easy… I hoped with some experience in guitar and piano that it wouldn’t be too hard. This was not the case.
The Video:
Key challenges:
- Breaking my violin on day 13 (whoops) while attempting to practice snowboarding was a big setback. Buying a new violin that I wasn’t very comfortable with took me back a week or so in progress. I also had gotten use to some of the finger positions and nuisances of my original violin.
- Starting with basic techniques. I should have invested more into the basic principles of violin. How to bow with a consistent sound. How to hold your hand in a consistent position so you can play notes by muscle memory and not by looking for the position. These fundamentals practiced from the start would have given me much faster progress.
- Small chunking my learning. I jumped into learning full sequences of songs by day 7 instead of small chunking specific parts of a song to learn a technique like fast bowing, string changes with the bow, intonation, etc… If I would have broken down the elements I was struggling with into smaller chunks I would have been able to make faster connections to my problems and have faster progress.
Key violin learnings:
- Bowing is difficult in itself. Long straight bows with a consistent sound are tough. Crescendos (soft to loud noise) and demiendos (loud to soft) are also tough. These should be practiced individually.
- A correct bow hold makes a big difference. Leveraging a curved thumb and pinky allows you to control the bow with much more accuracy. It feels awkward at first but perseverance is important.
- Intonation is hard. With violin there are no frets so the accuracy of your fingers on the fingerboard is very important. Practicing a variety of scales are a great way to practice this. Also reviewing the scale with an audio recording helps greatly too.
- A good violin matters. A bad violin just isn’t enjoyable to play. It’s much harder to get a clean sound. It doesn’t stay in tune long. Don’t spend $350 on a violin. Spend a little more and enjoy it. Or rent a violin.
- Vibrato (the shaking pitch sound) is really hard & may take a long time to master. I probably spent too long on vibrato before giving up. On YouTube people often spoke of taking a year or 2 before learning vibrato. I was hoping to get a basic sound for the video. I gave this up after a week or so of practicing this technique.
- Violin is played on many finger positions (moving your hand along the fingerboard). Again I spent a week or so learning the 3rd finger position. Whilst I got the hang of it I didn’t feel comfortable using it for the video as the intonation wasn’t clean enough.
Next Month
The next challenge is to learn photo realistic portrait drawing. Much less disturbing for my roommates that put up with a lot of squeaking this month.
Subscribe to my YouTube to see how i go -> https://goo.gl/ZsXVwh
