Mouse said
@stringy You are right. I did not scroll up all the way, although, I thought I was at the top. 

@RDP You need to be not so hard on yourself, too. What song or lesson are you on in your Suzuki? I would try to keep the additional song at the same level as your Suzuki. Something that uses what is covered in that lesson. What lesson and songs in the lesson are you working with? Which Suzuki book level?

Do you feel the songs you have been using with previous lessons added to the lesson or do you feel they were a little too ahead of the lesson? If you feel like they were a little too advanced for the lesson you were on, try to find one that goes a long with the lesson a little more. 

If you are not interested in keeping added material close to what the lesson is teaching,  and just want another song, I would still do the Ode to Joy, for the reasons given in my post where I mistook you for Stringy. 😂😂😂 That was so me!

🐭

  

I'm currently in Suzuki Book 1.  I have Minuet #'s 2 and 3 plus Gavotte and The Happy Farmer yet to do before I finish this book and move into Book 2.  This week's lesson is a review of earlier pieces to work on technique but after that, it's the 4 above that I'll be working on.  I think I'll be ready for Book 2 sometime in May or June depending on how well I do on Gavotte and Happy Farmer (they look tough to me).

Inisheer and A Time For Us both stretched my ability to play beyond where I was at the time.  Inisheer taught me slurs and a bunch of bowing techniques.  A Time For Us let me learn the D string better.  The help you guys game me on that one also let me understand more about bowing techniques than I knew or was being taught in my tutorial.  So both of those were "ahead" of where I was but not by too much and they helped me with my lessons and weren't a distraction.  Rather, they were more like a rest break during my practice sessions when I was struggling with the Minuet and the Etude before that.  I'd work on the lesson for about 15-20 minutes then break for a minute or 2, then play one of the other 2 pieces once or twice, take another short break then go back to the lesson.  It's why it took months for me to learn them while my lessons at most have only taken maybe 3 weeks before moving on to the next lesson.

Ode to Joy fits with that same program and it sounds like it will mesh well with my lessons very nicely, so that suggestion is a great one and I thank everyone who mentioned it.  I downloaded the sheet music that was linked above and will see how much damage I can do to it under the guise of "trying to learn."

ABitRusty said

RDP said

I added Ashokan Farewell to my list.  It's absolutely beautiful but well beyond what I can do right now.  There's no way I'm going to even try to do double stops at this stage of the game.

 

Although the Toronto Asian orchestra managed to play it like it was a classical piece it's still way too complex for me right now.

 

After sleeping on this, I think that Ashokan Farewell might be do-able later this year depending on what I'm learning at the time.

  

@RDP if youre playing inisheer you can ashokan.  The C natural in the B part is something to watch/listen for.  I dont ever feel like I do either one of those tunes justice but thats part of what we're doing...learning and making what weve learned better.

  

I'm probably going to go with Ode to Joy first, then we'll see if it's Ashokan or Ailein Duinn next.

I did find out today that the tuner that came with my violin is lying to me.  According to TWO tuner apps I downloaded, the one that came with my violin is a half step high on D and constantly wandering around on C to the point that eventually it says that C is right next to the nut on the A string.  It's no wonder I can't find the right notes, I can't get my violin in tune.

Mark said
RDP

Food for thoughtv is the clip on tuner set to A=440?

I have seen some set different and that will drive you crazy until you realize what the issue is. Don't ask me how I know.

Mark

  

Yeah, I double checked that, 440.  I just find it funny that eventually the tuner tells me that to hit the correct notes of C and D on the A string I have to cross my middle 2 fingers as I go up the scale.

Basically, it's junk.  The tuner has already launched the little spring between the jaws once and I had to superglue it back in place.  Next it froze and wouldn't display anything except a blank orange screen.  I did a hard restart (R&R the battery cover) and it wouldn't even start up afterward.  No matter what I did it wouldn't turn on afterward.  I messed around with it and eventually got it to start and do its thing, but that didn't last very long before it froze again.  I no longer trust it because it is verifiably wrong and obviously failure prone.

A very strange thing happened when I tuned by using the tuning App, I suddenly have good solid intonation if I play moderately slowly to be positive that I'm hitting the right spots on the fingerboard.  That alone leads me to believe that the tuner has been hurting my progress for a long time.