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.....