This is my 3 month and 1/2 (almost 4 months) recap. It's hard to believe that I have been playing the violin for almost 4 months. It definitely doesn't feel like it. It feels like I just started yesterday!
This month (and the end of July) has been a little bit slow as there were two or so days that I did not have lessons. Therefore, not many new tunes have been added to my repertoire. For the most part I have been polishing my older pieces. However, I finally made it to Minuet 1 by Bach! YESSSSS, my first REAL piece!!! I have been wanting to play the Minuets forever. It's nice to be able to play a piece that is more than 2 or 3 lines long.
Of course, with the Minuets come a few new skills that will take some time to improve on and polish. One of these is the use of the fourth finger. This has been giving me a bit of difficulty as it feels awkward and my finger isn't very "fit". I get very inconsistent tone when I use the fourth finger and my finger never lands in the right place. It will probably take some time to get the muscle memory to kick in so I don't have to think about where my finger is supposed to go.
In addition to this, I think this is also one of the first few pieces I have played that involve the use of more than 2 strings. Therefore, swinging my elbow to move around the fingerboard is a bit of a challenge. This is especially true for using the 4th finger since I really have to exaggerate this motion to be able to stretch and reach the note as my fingers are short. My coordination for this needs some work. My Minuet 1 still sounds quite awful and is very slow so I assume it will take more than a few weeks for me to improve and feel more natural while playing it. I can't wait until the use of the 4th finger feels a bit more natural so I can play this piece more smoothly.
Another piece I have been working on recently is the fight song of my local University. I am half way through it. Apparently this week we'll discuss new notes that show up in the remaining portion of this song. It's much easier than Minuet 1 so far so it hasn't been much of a struggle. We'll see how that changes this week when I learn the rest of it.
Ok, so how do I feel about the progress I have made in almost 4 months? It could be better but I feel that I am doing well for the amount of time I can practice violin. I go through these slumps where I just don't want to practice very much so on weeks like those I don't practice every day (which is not good). However, then I learn a new skill or piece that I like and get my enthusiasm back so I go back to practicing every day. My "slump" so far lasted about 3 weeks. I just didn't feel like doing anything because I was "stuck". I was not seeing very much progress and wasn't learning any new skills. During one of those weeks I only practiced less than 3 hours, which is extremely little given that I try to practice 1 hour a day (every day). Eventually I recovered and got my motivation back. I guess I just have to plow through practice even during the days when I'm just not feeling it. I'll thank myself later for practicing.
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