I first played fiddle about 20 years ago, for a few years. As long as I can remember, I had always wanted to play violin, but there were no orchestra programs in the schools and no violin instructors were readily available when I was a child. Instead I played piano and later chose clarinet as the band instrument that seemed as close as possible to a violin. Later on when in graduate school I was able to get a violin and I taught myself to play a number of fiddle tunes in Irish and old-time styles. I enjoyed playing a lot but had to put the fiddle aside for a while during dissertation writing and somehow I stayed away for many years.

Last year when my son started kindergarten, he began taking Suzuki violin through his school. Watching him learn made me want to play again, so I got a really cheap violin at Christmas and played Twinkle along with him. Then I started working a little bit ahead of him in the book - he is still on the Twinkle variations, though about to move on to the next song.

When I learned fiddle on my own years ago, I just learned the very basics (like finger positions in first position) from a method book and moved on immediately to figuring out fiddle tunes without paying much attention to proper technique. This time I've decided to spend more time upfront learning basic technique as best as I can, so I've decided to work my way through Suzuki Book 1 before I start trying to learn fiddle tunes again.

For various reasons I don't think I will be able to take weekly lessons long-term, but I am taking a few lessons to get started properly before any bad habits have too much of a chance to set in. I had my first real lesson last week, and it was very helpful.

One unfortunate aspect of taking up violin at an older than traditional age is that I have started experiencing some arthritis type issues in my left hand, which means that I am not always able to finger with my left hand. Usually I do have some hours in the day with sufficient flexibility to play with the standard violin hold, but I recently obtained a beginner-model reverse ("left handed") violin and have been experimenting with playing in reverse (left-handed bowing and right-handed fingering). I am finding it quite difficult to play with the opposite hands and hope that I will be able to continue with the standard set-up. For the moment I am trying to learn both ways, though I am somewhat more "advanced" with the standard hold.

I found this forum not long ago when looking for online instructional resources, and the website and forum seem to be a treasure trove of information. It will be fun to exchange information about learning to play.