A Major

The first thing I learned from Ms. Linda was what sharps and flats were. My book started with 3 sharps (#) and I had learned a few song with three sharps from the first Suzuki book but I just never knew what three sharps meant. The notes I learned on the G string were A, B, C#, and D.  I don't have any tapes on my violin. To learn the notes, my teacher first just had me keep moving my finger until I had the note right and I tried to remember where that spot was on my violin. That didn't work so well but at home I figured out that I could set my tuner on my stand and it would tell me when I got a note right and I could adjust my fingers myself when they were wrong. The notes on the D string are E, F#, G and A. On the A string they are B, C#, D and E and the E string they are F#, G#, A and B. What this looks like when you set your fingers down on the strings is that one the G and D string there is a space between your first and second fingers and another space between your second and third fingers but when you get to the A and E string there is only the space between the first and second fingers because the second and third fingers and close together and touching.
I practiced songs with three sharps for months and they never sounded nearly as nice as I wanted them to. Ms. Linda kept telling me that I wasn't supposed to sound good yet but I felt something had to be wrong with the way I was doing it. I tried to fix it by "pimping" up my cheap violin some but I'll keep that for the next post.

My New Teacher

So, of course, I called her. She explained that she had been playing violin...forever...and that she charged just $20 for a half hour lesson. She also was located in the town next to our which was great for me because I don't drive in the city and the town she lives in is very small.
I'll call her by her first name here Ms. Linda. Her and I hit it off right off. She is an older lady...actually much older at 74 than I ever would have guessed from looking at her. She also is quite short whereas I am 5 ft. 9 in. We started with both of us standing but have adjusted because of my height and an injury she has so that now we both sit during practice.
I must say that though I like her quite a lot at first I was not impressed with her teaching. She tends to skip around too much and assume I know things that I don't. She also can't seem to tell me what exactly I am doing wrong but can tell me when I haven't hit a note right. She had no plan on how to teach me. I brought her all sorts of books and she just sort of picked out of them. Finally I think she could tell that not only was this not working for me but I was thinking of quitting but I really didn't want to quit. We decided to follow one book. I picked the one that came with my violin because it started with the key of A and then D, G etc. (in other words, three sharps, two sharps and 1 sharp). That worked better except that all the songs in the book are classical. I am just not much of a fan of classical music. I want to be able to play songs I know and I love Irish music. Finally I took it into my own hands and would study the songs she asked me to during the week but then I would also do a song or two that I wanted to do and slowly it just turned into me always picking what to do and her just helping me out with any problems I had. I'm kind of teaching myself but I still couldn't do it without her because there would be no one there to correct my mistakes or tell me what different things mean. Eventually maybe I will find a different teacher who can take me to a higher level  of learning but for now it works for us.

The Beginning

It began many, many (way too many) years ago when I was in 4th grade. Our school offered lessons for many different instruments and I didn't think that we could afford one but we had a wonderful principal who found me on the playground and asked me if I was going to play an instrument and when I told him that we couldn't afford it he asked me what I wanted to play (this was a man who paid for our school pictures every year and I am sure would have got me whatever instrument I wanted). I told him I wanted to play the violin and he said that was great because the school had their own violins for us to use and we didn't even have to pay for them. Late that day he came and fitted me for the right size violin himself. He also went and found my brother and got him to take the trumpet lessons (which the school also had plenty of ). I have never met anyone so caring about the children in his care.
Anyway, so I took violin lessons. Unfortunately I wasn't very good at it. Well, maybe that is a bit too harsh. The other kids had had some kind of instrument backgrounds and they picked up on music reading really quickly but I never did. I didn't know how you knew which notes were which fingers on the strings. I did learn Allegro which was our first song but only because we went through it together line for line and I memorized it. The other kids moved on to Long, Long Ago while I still practiced Allegro and got so I could play it perfectly. My teacher didn't even notice that I couldn't play anything else until it was almost time for our performance at the end of the year. When she did another teacher was brought in and I had some one on one tutoring with a man but we never quite got all the way through Long, Long Ago. I was the only student who only learned one song.
You might think that would have been a deterrent but it never really was. I always wanted to have another violin and learn to play. But violins are expensive...at least they used to be but now with the wonders of Internet you can find anything cheap and I found the cheap $35 violins on eBay and bought one finally at age 44.

I was so excited! It actually came in on my birthday that year. But cheap is what it was and during my first tuning session I didn't just break a string I broke a fine tuner. Phil took it to a music shop and got it fixed (for $35 I might add). I bought a tuner and very carefully tuned it and I began to play.
I bought LOTS of books too. All sorts of "Teach Yourself" books. For a year I played all sorts of things...mostly badly and with the wrong fingerings.
It must be that the violin was too cheap so the next year I bough another cheap but not quite so cheap violin, a Cecillo 300. It was a vast improvement over the $35 violin and my playing improved slightly but I still didn't really know what I was doing.
And then one day I saw it "Violin Lessons" in an ad in the paper.....