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when you can hear how bad you sound it means you are improving. Before you couldnt hear it, because your ears were not trained at all, now they are getting better. Once you can hear your faults properly you can start to improve them.
What you will find is that every time you think you are finally playing in tune, you will suddenly realise that it can sound even more in tune, this is something that you have to experience and cant really be explained, not by me anyway. If you became happy with the sound you are producing you would never improve. The worlds greatest violinists constantly work on their intonation, all the time, for me thats the main use of scales.
I am telling you the truth here John, this instrument is very,very,very hard to learn, but you are doing something that other people cant do in a thousand years, getting any kind of tune out of this is fiendishly difficult, this is why violinists will help each other only they know how hard this is.
I am never ever happy with anything I play, even if I somehow manage to get it bang on in tune.
I will tell you one thing that you may find useful, when you use your tuner play a note D till its exactly correct, and I mean exact, listen to it, and keep listening, try to hear the hollow ring it has, its completely different to the sharp or flat sound, to me it sounds almost like a hiss, quite beautiful, the bow to me feels like its skating on ice when hit perfectly but may be different for you, fix the sound in your head, the note will ring unmistakeably, as will e, a and g, once you recognise these notes, scales become incredibly useful for fixing the other notes in between.
You are doing exceptionally well dont get disheartened, everyone takes two steps backwards before they improve,
you are getting good. You are making music, and god loves musicians, keep at it, your getting there.
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@JohnG thats a nice setup at the library. enjoyed the tour and videos. looks like you have all you need there and thatll help if you ever dive into the recording stuff more at home. maybe give you and idea of what you want/need if anything really. with you having access to that you may not want more..
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JohnG said
Another hour today with same repertoire. More ear training with tuner, especially first position C on G string and G on the D string. May be helping, but will need much more practice to get this right.
G on the D string is a little more interesting, as you should be able to hear and feel the G string vibrating in sympathy. Simple, slow scales are good for ear training - just GABCD on the G string, DEF#GA on the D string ABC#DE on the A and so on.
Andrew
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Hello @JohnG .
I have been remiss as to constantly following your blog. You may have mentioned this before, but I have not come across it.
I am curious as to the difficulty your had (if any) to adjusting the muscle memory of your bow hand after the luthier provided the viola with another bridge. I vividly remember the difficulty I had after adjusting mine.
Regarding your trials with intonation. A standard tuner incorporates compromises needed to create a “well tempered” key board. My intonation markedly improved when I moved to a more classically based physics system. Stand alone tuners need to be rather expensive to achieve this. Several apps for smart phones have the feature to do this. I did a thread here previously.
Success is the progressive realisation of a worthy ideal. —Earl Nightingale.
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