Comments

I've never seen the arpeggios. What is the fingering like? Is there a pattern with the string crossings you can hold in your mind's eye? Can you play it very slowly with a metronome with no problem?

If it was me I'd record the piano part on something the way I wanted it to go, and practice the violin with that, through speakers or bleeding through headphones. When I play with a metronome there's nothing expressive at all. I have to think too much about staying with it. But after a few days, and I'm not using it, whatever I was working on is more or less steady, and then some expression re-enters the picture. With a recorded piano might be like that at first.

I've read all the blog entries now. Nice.

If I had it to do over again, I would have used a different fingering to avoid string crossings. It was the string crossings. I spent this week just on spiccato and cleaned up the notes. It's much better now.

I don't even think about metronomes anymore when I use them, they've become such a part of the routine. I preach them to my students like doctrine.

Can't believe you read the whole thing.

Yep, I did. There was nothing else to read ;)

I'm learning my first ever classical guitar piece. Hard to believe or explain, but yes. I don't have a classical guitar and I don't hold it like a classical player, and I'm not going to start. It's for fun. It's something by Paganini for guitar I found the sheet music for on the web. I don't know what it is, but I think maybe it's from a book of progressive studies. All my problems with classical music came roaring back at me. I realized that in the stuff I play, I've never once had to think about phrasing, dynamics, and a host of other things that go into classical. In that music there aren't many requirements and it just takes care of itself naturally there. So I'm using a metronome a lot to keep the beats even and for tempo. I can play it accurately, but it still sounds bad, and the thing is, I'm not too interested in fixing it, assuming I could figure out how :) I don't think it's difficult as classical guitar goes. Next I might find something that's supposed to be extremely difficult and learn that, as long as the difficulty doesn't come from stretches - I don't want to have to work on that. Speed and coordination I can probably handle.

How to fix it might be an interesting discussion, but I mean in practical terms I'm not interested in fixing it.