Saturday, April 5, 2008

Violin Lessons at Home with a Master

Lately I've been getting violin lessons from one of the world's greatest living violinists. Not in person, of course. Who could afford that? Instead, I spent $29.95 to download ViolinMasterPro, a series of videos from master violinist & teacher Dr. Eric Lewis.

Dr. Lewis has a ton of credentials. You can Google him if you don't recognize the name. But he's known worldwide, and now he performs every day in my computer.

Sometimes I think I'm a pretty good player, but I guess a real professional violinist would call me a "wannabe." And that's true. I definitely wanna be. That's why I figured, "How far wrong can I go with this video training?" Worst that could happen was, I'd be out a
few bucks.

But now that I've been doing the training a few weeks, I have to tell you - I am a WAY better player than I used to be. And that isn't just my opinion. This last week, my wife had some friends over ... and she asked me to play for them. She showed me off to them, like I was some circus act. But don't kid yourself - I loved entertaining for them. And I love the fact my wife thinks I'm a pretty good player.

In one of these videos, Lewis shows how to take a piece you've never heard before, and just play it off the cuff ... and do a darned good job of it. I always figured that was one of the abilities that set a pro apart from an amateur. But guess what? By that definition, I'm now a pro. And my confidence level has gone through the roof.

As you can probably figure out, I'm having a lot more fun in my life right now. And some of the changes I've made are really basic. You'd think after more than 25 years of playing and a long string of pretty good teachers, I'd at least have my arm and wrist in position to get the best results. But Dr. Lewis gave me just one tip on proper wrist position that has made a huge difference in the energy I can put into the pieces I play.

The step-by-step in these videos is easy enough for an amateur to follow. But I'll bet even pros will get some valuable tips out of them. I figure it doesn't matter who you are or what you do, you need a coach. Every Olympic athlete has their own coach. Tiger Woods is the best golfer ever, and he still has his own coach. Anyone who wants to improve their violin-playing could do way worse than to have Dr. Lewis as their coach.

You can get the videos at ViolinMasterPro. I think you'll be pretty glad you did.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing such amazing information on Violin Music Lessons...

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing very useful information, the above post is very useful forViolin Teachers Portland...

centralcoastconservatorium said...

that's brilliant blog for music education.Stringing Lessons is so good.

centralcoastconservatorium said...

This article is so good for music educations in Australia.Stringing Lessons is so good.