Violist Nick Revel Makes Etudes Heroic
Why can't etudes be fun and fantastical?
After he made DragonScales in 2023 to add pizzazz to three-octave scales and arpeggios, violist and composer Nick Revel turned his attention to a genre whose very name can connote drudgery: the etude ("study," in French.)
Revel, a founding member of the Grammy-nominated PUBLIQuartet, has written 25 etudes, available in versions for violin, viola and cello. But unlike, say Kreutzer or Mazas, he did not simply call his book "25 Etudes" - much more interestingly, Revel's book, which came out in late 2024, is called The Hero Levels: 25 Fantasy Etudes to Slay Evil.
Violist Nick Revel, surrounded with images from his 'DragonScales - The Hero Levels: 25 Fantasy Etudes to Slay Evil.'
He didn't stop there. He created a written story, complete with illustrations (made by Revel with Gencraft), shown alongside the sheet music. The story encourages the player to imagine a series of scenes - to embark on a hero's journey, to leave home and explore dazzling foreign lands, to battle monsters - and even possibly - "to save all humanity from the clutches of evil."
I mean, why not?
To put even more cinematic scope on all of this, this week Revel releases the Hero Levels Original Soundtrack - a set of play-along audio recordings to make it all the more immersive - and you can get it with an actual storybook novella.
You could say that Revel created all of this in a "fever dream" - it all happened June 2023, while he was in South America on vacation. He was sick with a temperature of 101.9ºF, at an altitude of 13,123 feet in Ecuador, staying near the Chimborazo volcano.
"Alone with the Alpacas peering into our wood cabin through the window, bored out of my mind, and delirious in my fever dreams, on a whim I drafted the entire Hero Levels project from start to finish," Revel writes in the forward to the etude books. "The idea to combine a fantasy story, inspired by my childhood nostalgia for role-playing games and Japanese anime, with etudes and audio backing tracks that function as the story's soundtrack, lit up in my mind like a beacon. 'It will be like a video game,' I thought."
The violin, viola and cello versions are all actually different, but they can be played together, so teachers can use the etudes for orchestra or group classes. Within each instrument, Revel has also created three different "Difficulty Modes" for various levels of players, tracked to the Suzuki books and beyond: "Story" level for Suzuki Book 2-5; "Noble" level for Suzuki Book 5+; and "Legend" level for Concerto level players. All levels can be played together. You can check out a sample on this page, which allows you to play the track and to download sample pages of the music and story for the book's first etude, "The Hero from Amberglade." (You'll find violin, viola and cello samples, in all three levels).
For Revel, playing etudes was always a chore. As he wrote his Fantasy Etudes, "I reflected on how awful Mazas, Kreutzer, Campagnoli, Dont, and all the others, accompanied by Dr. Beat (the metronome) blasting “ONE TWO THREE FOUR” was for my hormone-addled adolescent brain....They weren't fun," he wrote. "Learning the craft of an instrument should be fun!"
After all, isn't learning the viola, violin or cello pretty heroic? As part of this fantastical journey Revel asks, "What hidden strengths must you cultivate, what resources must you learn to wield to meet the challenges along your foretold path, and — most importantly, to become the hero you truly are?"
We must cultivate our technique, yes - but it certainly helps to improvise and imagine along the way!
Get the DragonScales etude books, which include the written music as well as the scene-setting story, here. Download "The Hero Levels Original Soundtrack" here.
You might also like:
- For the Record, Op. 220: Nick Revel's 'Dream Collider'
- VIDEO: Watch PUBLIQuartet's Grammy-nominated 'What is American?' in Live Performance
- Discussion: Scales but not the usual?
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August 29, 2025 at 08:54 AM · I think this is actually a really good idea. Especially for someone as an example, who is into Dungeons & Dragons or similar. A way to combine their musical life with their interests outside.