Playing bumble bees on the violin 🐝🐝🐝

For several weeks, I've been teaching violin to young kids through a company called Conservatory at Home. It's a fun job, and really rewarding to see small kids learn what are definitely some difficult techniques involved in playing the violin.

I started violin myself at the age of 11, and played through 12th grade in my school orchestra. At that time, I also played piano and flute, with piano being my focus. My senior year of high school I went to state on piano, getting a perfect score, for which I had to know four-octave scales in every key (both hands, and you didn't know which keys they'd ask you to play), in addition to performing a solo piece - in my case, Beethoven's Pathétique [No. 8] Sonata - and sight-reading.

When I was learning to play the violin, my initial lessons were pretty boring. I had to learn how to hold the violin and bow long before I played a note. Standing with the instrument tucked under my jaw and my hands by my side was a whole skill necessary to master before my teacher let me experiment with actual music. Then again, I was 11 and was capable of some delayed gratification and patience. At right is a photo of me playing in high school at the age of 15.

My youngest student, Evelyn, is five years old and it's been challenging for me to get across to her some of the concepts that can be either boring or difficult (often both). She has a very short attention span and no patience at all. And because she was super excited to play the violin, I knew that spending a month on stance and resting position wasn't going to fly.

So I decided early on to skip the mainstream lesson plans. In order to keep her attention and enthusiasm, she needed to be able to make some noise with the instrument right off the bat. With Evelyn, I didn't worry about her stance or how she held the instrument. Those things can be corrected, but if she rejects the idea of violin lessons, that's harder to "correct."

Instead, I started her out with something that, as far as I know, I invented: bumble bees. 🐝

A bumble bee is a sawing of the bow, four quick, back-and-forths across one string that sound like buzzing. Each bumble bee is identified it by its string. So I'd play one on the A string and call it an "A-string bumble bee." Then I'd ask Evelyn to play an A-string bumble bee, a D-string bumble bee, and so on. Right away she was making noise with her instrument - not a grating or accidental noise, but a clear note on an open string with a deliberate move of the bow. And there was a huge side benefit: by the end of our first lesson Evelyn could identify and find all four strings on her violin by name. She learned this without me lecturing or explaining or telling. We just played and had fun and in 10 minutes she could play a D-string bumble bee without anyone telling her which string was D. For a five year old, that's huge.

My violin next to Evelyn's

I've come up with some other useful techniques for teaching violin to a student as young as Evelyn, which I'll be sharing over the coming weeks, and would love to connect with other string players and string teachers!