5 Dumb Mistakes Hurting Your Violin Progress

these mistakes might be dumb but always remember that doesn't mean you are i'm dubai murphy and this is murphy music academy [Music] and of course if you want to be learning violin making fewer unnecessary mistakes then you should shoot an email to admin at murphymusicacademy.org and we will set you up with your free first trial lesson with one of our qualified private teachers offering lessons in violin viola and even cello now now today we're going to be doing something a little bit different because i'm not going to be talking at all really about any mistakes that you are making technically at least when i say technically i mean physically what i want to talk about today is mistakes that you're making up here that have profound impacts on your playing and your development there is unfortunately not a lot of talk in violent pedagogy concerning the psychological aspects of learning to play the violin or performing the violin now of course there is some but it hasn't really been explored or certainly codified as much as the technical and physical aspects of playing the violin but the more i teach the more i play the more i see the importance of focusing on and developing some kind of system for teaching the mental aspect of violent playing as a matter of fact i'm to the point now where i almost think that most of people's problems with violin are mental not that of course you shouldn't be focusing on the mechanics as you know most of the videos on this channel are about technique and about mechanics but beyond that what happens up here has such profound effect on even what you do mechanically that i almost think that we should as violin teachers be developing some kind of systematic codified approach to the mental aspect of playing i don't currently have a systematic approach to teaching the mental side of violin playing i'm hoping to develop that in the future but what i do have currently is a few common mistakes that i found that students make that if you can convince yourself to avoid them you'll put yourself in a much better position mentally for violin playing going forward so mistake number one false starts if you come to me for a lesson and you decide to do a little testing note before you start [Music] then i'm going to make you stop entirely reset yourself and start over again without doing that that is a horrible habit to get into and here's why as many of you know playing violin can be a very nerve-wracking experience and within violin playing one of the most nerve-wracking of nerve-wracking experiences is starting a piece of music so what you are doing by giving yourself the few extra little extra starts at the beginning of a piece even when you're playing for a lesson or when you're practicing because you obviously can't get away with that in a performance what you're doing is teaching yourself not to be secure in the start of a piece something that you're already will have a tendency to be insecure in you are actually accentuating the feeling of insecurity you see we always think about practicing our music practicing the notes getting things perfect physically and technically and all that stuff but we don't think as much about how to practice security how to practice how we feel in a performance and that's understandable because that's kind of a hard thing to mimic in the practice room but this is actually one of the rare chances where we get to practice being more secure and one of the ways you do that is whenever you start if you don't like if you're going to be playing something through right not just doing passage work but if you're going to be playing something through either for yourself for a friend or for a teacher then do not allow yourself to restart and if you don't like the way you sound when you start if it's not quite perfect then you need to learn how to accept that i know i'm the guy that says there's no pleasure in mediocrity right okay so when you're done performing or when you're done playing for your teacher or whatever you go home and you practice it you try to make it better but in that moment you have to learn to let it go right and if you do that enough oddly enough you're actually probably going to play more accurately when you perform because you're going to feel less stressed because you don't have this this binding perfectionism that you've been practicing every time you've been trying to play through a piece now in a similar vein let's talk about common mistake number two which i will explain what this means but the best way i can describe this is not approaching the violin honestly now what i mean by approaching the violin honestly or dishonestly well there's two major ways i find that people approach the violin dishonestly the first way is let's say you're going to start a piece okay and you try to make sure you've got everything exactly right but you're still really worried about the sound and you think if you you build up all this tension and then you attack the violin right there you like try to get out in front of whatever you're doing and hopefully if you do it so quickly that you don't even have time to think about it maybe something will kick in and you won't make a mistake that is one dishonest approach to playing the violet the other dishonest approach is the opposite but it's still dishonest you set yourself up okay try to make sure everything's there try to put the ball on the string first maybe make sure everything's there try to check every single muscle and then still building up a lot of tension and then and then starting there one is the fast approach where you try to i say get out in front of the violin hope that if you do things before thinking you won't have time to make a mistake and the other one is where you sit and you think so much about everything and you're almost like trying to bargain with the violin like if i put my hand like this and if i hold it like this will you please make a good sound both of those are dishonest approaches the honest approach is to and i'm going to use the violin as you know kind of a person in this metaphor is to walk up to the violin greet the violin as an equal say to the violin i would like to have this sound tell the violin which you want and expect that the violin will either oblige or it won't and either way and this is going to be common theme you'll find in this video you're going to be fine with that so uh honest approach would be ok violin i'm going to put my finger here i'm going to take my bow i'm going to put it here and then whenever i'm ready i'm going to start you're not trying to make any tricks you're not trying to do some magic formula that's going to magically make everything come out okay you're not trying to beat yourself or the violin to the punch you're approaching the violin honestly and if you approach the violin honestly and you don't get the sound you want well then once again you have your little conversation with the violin you can think of practicing as a conversation that you're having with the violin and you say to the violin okay well clearly that didn't work right whatever i wanted to have you do didn't work that way so what if i tried it this way instead and you kind of mess around and try different things until you find the approach the violin is going to agree to and then through this type once again we're practicing what happens in here and also you know what we feel inside while we're playing now you have an approach to the violin that is both consistent and also isn't based on you really worrying about how things are going to sound when you first start you kind of again let go a little bit of that binding perfectionism which will actually in the long run probably make you play better now mistake number three and this one has some caveats to it but for most of you this is going to be just exactly as i lay this out adjusting while practicing some students and i used to be this way get into the bad habit of trying to adjust and fix their intonation on the fly for example if you're playing a scale [Music] maybe you could tell maybe you couldn't but i was doing tiny little adjustments for my fingers to try to adjust the intonation to get it exactly where i wanted while i was playing and you might think to yourself what is the problem with that well if you're especially if you're student and you don't have as much experience this can pose some serious problems for your development first off when you practice you want to practice having the finger try and hit the bull's eye of the note the moment it touches the string now obviously that's not going to happen all the time when you're performing but that's the way you want to practice and this is largely because if you try to focus on you know doing little adjustments while you play what you're doing inevitably is encouraging a lot more squeezing and tension in your hand because when you adjust you're going to have to adjust against the thumb against the pressure of the thumb so what you're doing when you practice you're practicing in tension with your playing and keeping on with the theme of the mental aspects of playing what else are you doing when you make as just your modus operandi constantly adjusting your fingers while you play well you are practicing in you are telling yourself while playing that you assume that you're going to be wrong you are baking into the cake of your playing the assumption that you are going to make mistakes and that your fingers are not going to hit the right place and that you're always going to have to constantly fix what you're doing while you're playing so not only are you practicing in that physical tension in the left hand but you are also practicing in that psychological tension the inner tension which i think might actually have more detrimental effects on your playing than the physical tension now i know that some of you are probably thinking yeah but didn't heifetz say that he when he played his fingers wouldn't hit the right spot and he'd adjust it so quickly that nobody in the audience could tell that he actually started the note out of tune and to that i'd say um i've never seen a primary source for that quote as far as i know it's purely an anecdote and quite frankly i don't think he actually said that that being the case this is the one caveat that i will give to this that i mentioned at the beginning sometimes there is utility to doing a little bit of adjusting in a performance especially if you're playing with a small ensemble where making sure that everyone matches up with each other is you know paramount okay so you might have to listen to your colleagues and make little adjustments on the fly however when you're practicing you do not want to approach things this way you want to approach it and again this is you know the theme of today if my fingers out of tune i learn to be okay with that i go back and try to teach the finger how to fall in the right place but i'm not going to build up i'm not going to practice building up this tension either in my hand or in my heart speaking of tension of the heart let's talk about mistake number four which is bad mouthing your own playing now my experience with this mostly comes from being a teacher where a student will come in and before they've even played a single note do they want to let me know just about how bad they're going to sound today and how things didn't really go very well for them this week and they apologize profusely for what i'm about to hear and if you tend to do this whether you do it in a lesson or you do it at home or you do it anytime you play i'm going to tell you what i tell my students stop it bad mouthing yourself doesn't help the situation right let's say you didn't practice very well this week whether it was you know by your own choice or just life circumstances whether it was you know you had a good reason for it or not telling me that you're going to sound bad isn't going to make you sound any better right it's not going to make and we've talked about this all this this video it's not going to make you feel any better it's not going to make you any less nervous it's not going to help a single thing and it's probably going to make you worse right you keep talking about how bad you're going to play well guess what that's probably going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy okay our subconscious listens to what we say i firmly believe that and if we constantly bad mouth how we're going to play because we think that maybe softens the blow of you know the bad playing that we're already planning on doing this is another problem planning on playing poorly i think that just puts your entire psyche and your entire person in the mode of being okay with playing poorly right there's a lot of things we talked about that you should be okay with right i make a little mistake here i'm going to be okay with that because i'm going to go and fix it right i'm not going to make it a big deal right what i don't want you and this is the theme of the channel to be okay with is mediocrity and think that just because you recognize that you're playing mediocre that that suddenly makes everything okay so if you haven't prepared as well as you'd like for your teacher then you can acknowledge that but don't don't talk about how bad you're gonna play just play and your teacher is there to help you get better and if it's your fault for not practicing enough well once again except you made a mistake and practice more the next week now when you do practice more the next week make sure that you don't make this fifth and final mistake which is not practicing scales i don't know exactly what this is maybe it's you know just general maturity but i practice skills way more now that i'm a professional and older than i ever did as a student when i was a student i was a very bad boy i did not practice skills hardly ever unless i had to play them for like a jury or something like that huge mistake i should have been doing this for the past 10 years i was a student for almost in university and conservatory for almost 10 years barely practice skills now that i'm out and about on my own i practice skills for at least 45 minutes every single day think about scales and you know people will say well why should you practice scales wells because there's scales and arpeggios in every piece and that is a reason to practice scales but that's not the real primary most important reason why you should practice scales what skills do is provide a familiar context assuming that you've learned all your skills for practicing any aspect of technique that you want so let's say you want to practice you know certain aspects of your bowing or your tone well you don't have to worry about learning the notes of the scale assuming you've learned all the scales and you do have to go through the process of learning them but once you've learned them you don't have to worry about fingering you don't have to worry about bowing you don't have to worry about you know exactly what string you're going to play on all of that is just baked into the process and you can focus on any aspect of technique you want any aspect of playing you want today i want to play this scale and i want to focus on tone so i'm going to focus i'm going to do big long tones on every single one of these notes and my focus is to have a beautiful tone starting here in first position and having the same beautiful tone across all four strings and up to the higher positions let's say i want to focus on playing spacato so you know i'm gonna practice each note like that maybe i'll start doubling in to get used to the arm and then i want to coordinate them i can practice focusing on those things i can practice doing it all in one bow and i can also practice and this is very important in how to listen because some keys are easier to play in tune on the violin than others d major is way easier to play in tune on the violin because we have an open d string and an a string all sorts of things that you know match with the notes in d major than it is to play an e flat even though they're just a half step away from each other e flat i have to if i'm going to practice e flat i have to learn how to listen a lot closer than i would when i'm playing d major so there's all of these opportunities for you to practice these things you can practice your articulation as i talked about earlier right if i'm not adjusting my fingers can i make sure that when my fingers hit the string and hopefully hit that bull's eye of the note that each each note is as clear as a bell the moment hits the string something i've been doing lately i've been so i just take two notes at a time [Music] so i'm not adjusting i'm not doing anything i'm trying to keep my hand very still and i'm just practicing the transition from note to no and then of course you can get into double stop scales scales and thirds skills and octaves scales and fingered octaves you can do skills all on a single string the possibilities for your practice are endless and if you're not doing it you're leaving so much development on the table anyway a little bit different sort of video that i'm usually used to making i will get back to making videos about actual you know how to do physical technique and things like that but um i hope you found this to be useful the mental and psychological aspect of playing is something that i found to be severely lacking in terms of kind of the system of violin teaching i have many books over there that talk all about physical and technical aspects of violent playing but not as much talk is going into or at least systematize talk going into what happens in the mind while you're playing so i hope to be exploring that more in the future and i hope that you will get something out of it anyway i have been to biomurphy for murphy music academy always here to remind you that there is no pleasure in mediocrity happy practicing and i'll see you next time

Channel: Murphy Music Academy

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Keywords: twoset violin, violin, viola, cello, ling ling, practice, Julia Bushkova, UNT, the bow, hand, basics, seesaw, hold, hang, dumb mistakes, holding the bow, russian, best way, best, moscow, conservatory, texas, help, guide, arm weight, thumb, pinkie, the bow hand, bowing hand, bowing, bow arm, bowing arm, bow grip, bow hold, learn, university, violin techniques, violin advice, professor, ameb, abrsm, mozart, soloist, auditions, perform, concert, tutorial, education, lesson, tobiah murphy, murphy music academy

Id: etzoz99aQdM

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022