Learn How To Play The Violin

Do you want to learn how to play the violin? It truly is a beautiful sounding instrument. And if you want to learn, you certainly can. Most people will tell you that to play this difficult instrument you need to start young. That can be beneficial for sure, but the fact is that you can learn to play and play well at any age.

Taking private lessons from a qualified teacher can help, but starting out you may do just as well learning the basics from a friend or relative that plays. For instance you don’t need a pro to teach you how to hold the instrument, yet this is very important. Get this wrong and you’ll be very uncomfortable. You may be tempted to quit before you really get started, or worse, you could even suffer some form of stress injury. So let’s do this right. Start by putting your left arm under the body of the violin. Hold the neck with your left hand and curl your fingers over the neck. Your hand and fingers will be on top of the strings and the the chin rest on the instrument will be between your chin and left shoulder. Take the bow in your right hand an you’re ready to go.

Once you’ve learned to hold the violin properly, you can begin to learn how to finger notes on the violin. Unlike guitars, violins do not have frets. Instead, violin players literally play “by ear” until they know exactly where each note falls on the fingerboard.

For this, you’ll need to identify four positions on your violin. The first position is located the furthest away from your face and has low pitched notes. The last in fourth position is the highest notes and is the furthest up the neck. The strings themselves are tuned to specific notes; lowest to highest, they are tuned at G, D, A, and E as “open” strings, whereby there are no fingers pressing on the strings when you play. Other notes can be played by placing your fingers as instructed by your teacher at various places on the strings themselves.

Notes are play in one of two ways. The are played pizzicato, (by plucking them) or by running the bow across the strings slowly and steadily. Most people learn by plucking and advance from there.

You’re also going to need to learn how to read music. You have several options for this. The easiest would be to get a friend or relative that already knows to teach you. You can also hire a professional, take a class, or just search the Internet for one of many instructional sites.

You should know before you start that it will take years of hard work, dedication and practice before you become an expert and that’s OK. You don’t have to be an expert to have fun playing this wonderful instrument. Just get started and you’ll see what I mean.