This year, I am excited to take on violin for my In-Depth Project. The project will span over five months until May, in which I will hopefully be able to learn a great deal about the basics and hopefully some intermediate violin techniques that aren’t extensively taught in school. Throughout the process, I will be assisted by an experienced mentor to help guide my learning and help me with problems I have.

I have been playing piano for several years now, which should help a lot with theory and reading sheet music. I have a small amount of violin experience from a club in elementary school; however, the club was mostly just playing songs in a large group and did not involve any individual learning. As such, I barely learned the very basics. Since I have probably lost most of my experience over the many years that I haven’t touched my violin, I decided to refresh my memory by playing a little bit over winter break. The topics I remember learning a bit about include:

• How to grip the bow. However, I definitely need to improve my bowing technique as it is currently quite poor.
• Finger positioning in major keys starting on open strings. As mentioned earlier, I have lost all of my muscle memory, but I have somewhat regained it over winter break. Nevertheless, I can’t position my fingers very fast nor accurately. I am considering putting tape on my fretboard to help me develop my accuracy until my muscle memory gets better (see image below). I don’t have the muscle memory for any scales starting on non-open strings or minor scales. Hopefully, I can learn some more scales in the next month or two.
  
• How to take care of my violin. I still remember how to put rosin on my bow and tune my violin with a tuner. I plan on learning how to tune by ear, which will greatly make the process faster.

Currently, I would consider myself at a beginner level. Some other goals I have include:

• Learning music notation unique to the violin.
• Learning how to play pizzicato (plucking the strings directly with fingers instead of using the bow).
• If I have time, I would also like to try out arranging music for violin.

Why?

I chose to play violin because I love the sound of the instrument and learning about would be beneficial to my ear training. I also feel that there will be a lot more to learn about violin or even other instruments after this project ends. As mentioned earlier, with my current knowledge of music theory from piano, I am very interested in arranging music or even composing for different instruments. In the future, I feel like this could be a fun hobby.

Mentor

My mentor this year is William, an advanced violin student the same age as me. He has the experience to answer most questions I have, since he has been playing violin for at least seven years. The main reason I chose him is because we are good friends and he lives nearby to me, so we may be able to have in-person meetings. This is especially beneficial for learning instruments, as it would be very hard for a mentor to see the instrument through a video call.

Timeline

By the end of the project, I will learn and master two or three pieces incorporating the techniques that I have learned. Here is a rough timeline of my current plan:

Buy a violin and other related supplies	Week 1 (done)
Find a mentor	Week 2-3 (done)
Do basic research about the violin and start practising proper bowing and finger positioning. From this point onwards in my project, my mentor will be helping me and offering feedback, which will help correct bad habits.	Week 3-5
Learn my first beginner piece from the repertoire.	Week 6-7
Learn intermediate techniques such as pizzicato and staccato.	Week 8-10
Start practicing sight reading and ear training alongside learning some other pieces and continuing to perfect my technique.	Week 11-14
Master 1-3 more difficult pieces involving all the new techniques that I have learned so far	Week 15-20

To show my learning, I will be posting on my blog every two weeks. I will try to record videos of myself playing in order to better illustrate my level of proficiency and demonstrate anything new that I have learned. Hopefully there will be contrast in between the blog posts.

In the next couple weeks, I plan on continuing “playing around” with the violin and working with my mentor more in order to get a better feel for the instrument. After this I will refine my plan more and start learning some new techniques to be able to begin playing my first song or two.

 

Thank you for reading! I look forward to this project, and if you are interested, make sure to read my next post in two weeks!